Error analysis

Short Definition

Error Analysis is a branch of Applied Linguistics. It is concerned with the compilation, study and analysis of errors made by second language learners and aims at explaining second language acquisition by these means.

Closely connected to this discipline is the concept of interlanguage.

Some researchers distinguish Error Analysis from Transfer Analysis, which compares the learner’s data with the respective first language, whereas Error Analysis compares the learner’s data with the target language norm and identifies and explains errors accordingly (James 1998).

Development

Error Analysis was first used as a means of studying second language acquisition in the 1960s. Corder’s seminal paper “The Significance of Learner’s Errors” (1967) had shifted researchers’ attention from the teaching perspective to the learning perspective – and therefore also away from Contrastive Analysis, behaviorism and structuralism towards cognitive psychology. This was in line with the turn toward the Communicative Approach in language teaching.

Drawing on knowledge of first language acquisition, Corder posited the notion that the second language learner discovers the target language by hypothesizing about it and testing his or her hypotheses – more or less like children do. This happens not randomly, but following the learner’s built-in syllabus, he said, so that errors will necessarily be made.

Corder used the term transitional competence for what has since become a widely accepted and often used concept: that of interlanguage (Selinker 1972), the learner’s individual, dynamic approximation of the target language. Errors, according to this view, indicate that the learner actively learns the target language, for they occur whenever a hypothesis the learner tests does not work. In Error Analysis, the language learning process is thought to be influenced by the learner’s first language, his or her interlanguage and the target language. Thus, all of these three language systems have an influence on which errors the learner makes. But the gap between the interlanguage and the target language is considered the most important factor of the three. More importantly, however, the learner makes errors because of the learning strategies he or she employs to ‘discover’ the target language.

For all these reasons, inductive error analyses were carried out in order to draw generalizations about errors, interlanguage and, ultimately, second language acquisition. Error Analysis reached its zenith in the 1970s, but soon turned out to be deficient as a research tool. By the late 1970s, it was merely contributing to broader second language acquisition theory and research, as it still does today.

Aims

The aims of error analyses were to identify types and patterns of errors and to establish error taxonomies. These should then be used to describe interlanguage and its development, i.e. the learner’s internal syllabus. Common difficulties in second language acquisition were to be identified. All this should eventually lead to comprehensive knowledge of the processes of second language acquisition – always assuming with Chomsky that there is something like a language acquisition device.

In addition, results should be used to review language learning theories as well as help to evaluate and improve language teaching.

Results

The main achievements of Error Analysis are changes of perspective. Firstly, it changed how learners’ errors were viewed. No longer were they “signs of inhibition” (Corder 1967) that needed to be eradicated. Instead, they were regarded as useful “evidence of his strategies of learning” (Corder 1967) and as perfectly natural. Secondly, it widened the perspective on possible causes of errors. Researchers saw that the first language is not the only – in fact, not even the most important - factor that can lead to errors.

Common errors for different target languages were identified and, in search of reasons why those errors were made, they were classified in a new way. Errors were distinguished from mistakes or lapses, which are performance errors that are not determined by the interlanguage but rather by situational factors such as tiredness. Only ‘true’ errors are connected to the state of the interlanguage, or the learner’s competence. Interlingual errors, a result of interference from the native language, were differentiated from intralingual errors, occuring for example when a target language rule is applied to areas where it is not applicable. Corder also pointed out that an utterance which is seemingly correct but does not mean what the speaker or writer intended it to mean contains, in fact, a covert error.

Error Analysis also played an important role in the development of the Interlanguage Hypothesis.

Criticism

Error Analysis has been criticized for a number of problems concerning its practice, all of them connected to the fact that it tries to gather knowledge of language learning processes by examining the learner’s output. First of all, it has proved difficult to determine whether there is an error at all, and if so, what exactly constitutes it. The distinction between error and mistake cannot easily be made either. Secondly, there is usually cannot more than just one way to classify an error. Thirdly, errors’ causes are difficult to name; there is a multitude of possible causes (e.g. communication strategies, personal factors, external factors) and since there is only the learner’s output that can be examined, found causes are necessarily unreliable. In addition, “error taxonomies often confuse description with explanation” (Johnson & Johnson 1998:112), thus doing little to help learners.

Other criticism has aimed at the simplistic approach Error Analysis takes toward second language acquisition. Only looking at incorrect output and ignoring correct output as well as any other aspects of the learning process means leaving out important sources of information to describe the acquisition process. This is connected to the fact that correct output does not necessarily mean that something has been learned – because the learner’s language production varies, among other reasons.

As a result, there has been much criticism of this kind of research. For example, it has been claimed that what were called ‘universal’ errors (errors that are made by any learner of a given target language, no matter what the first language) might in fact be interference errors (Byram 2004, cited in James 1998).

References

• Cherrington, Ruth. 2004. Error Analysis. In: Byram, Michael (ed.) Routledge Encyclopedia of Language Teaching and Learning. London/New York: Routledge. 198-200.
• Corder, S.P. 1967. The Significance of Learner’s Errors. In: IRAL 5/1967. 161-170.
• Ellis, Rod. 2008. The Study of Second Language Acquisition (2nd edition). Oxford: OUP. 47; 60-65.
• James, Carl. 1998. Errors in Language Learning and Use – Exploring Error Analysis. Essex: Pearson.
• Johnson, Keith & Johnson, Helen (ed.) 1998. Encyclopedic Dictionary of Applied Linguistics – A Handbook for Language Teaching. Oxford/Malden: Blackwell. 110-114.