Glottodidactics Lesson 3

Glottodidactics OUTLINE What is error analysis? Identifying Errors Describing Errors Explaining Errors Error Evaluation

Glottodidactics KEYWORDS: ERROR ERROR ANALYSIS GLOBAL/LOCAL ERRORS ERROR OF OMISSION GLOBAL/LOCAL ERRORS TRANSFER ERRORS MISINFORMATION MISORDERING OVERGENERALIZATION ERRORS

Glottodidactics What is an error? What is a mistake? Why do learners make errors/mistakes? Are errors /mistakes important ? Why (why not)? Are they helpful? Why (why not)? How can we distinguish errors and mistakes? How can we describe /explain / judge them?

Glottodidactics An error is something you have done which is considered to be incorrect or wrong, or which should not have been done. If you do something in error you do it because you have made a mistake especially in your judgement. The plane was shot down in error by a NATO missile.

Glottodidactics A mistake is something or part of something which is incorrect or not right. If you make a mistake, you do something which you did not plan to do, or which produces a result that you do not want.

ERROR & ERROR ANALYSIS Maybe it sounds strange to focus on what learners get wrong instead of on what they get right. However, there are good reasons for focusing on errors. 1. They are an evident characteristic of learner language, so that you may ask the following question: “Why do learners make errors”?

ERROR & ERROR ANALYSIS 2. it is useful for teachers to know what errors learners make. 3. it is possible that making errors can help learners to learn when they self-correct the error they make. The first step in analysing errors is to identify them.

ERROR & ERROR ANALYSIS To identify errors we have to compare the sentences learners produce with the “normal” or “correct” sentences in the target language. Sometimes learners produce sentences that are possible target-language sentences but not preferred ones. Occasionally, it is difficult to reform the correct sentence because we are not sure what the learner meant to say.

ERROR & ERROR ANALYSIS Therefore, we need to distinguish errors and mistakes. Errors reflect gaps in a learner’s knowledge; they occur because the learner does not know what is correct. Mistakes reflect occasional falls in performance; they occur because, in a particular occasion, the learner is unable to perform what he or she knows.

DESCRIBING ERRORS After that all the errors have been identified, they can be described and classified into types. For example, they can be classified into grammatical categories (e.g., verbs, like errors in the past tense), or we could try to identify general systems in which the learners’ words differ from the reformed target-language words.

DESCRIBING ERRORS Such systems include omission (leaving out an entry that is required for a word to be considered grammatical), “misinformation” (using one grammatical form in place of another grammatical form) and “misordering” (putting the words in a verbal communication in the wrong order).

DESCRIBING ERRORS Classifying errors in these ways can help us to identify learners’ learning problems at any stage of their development, and, also, to design how changes in error structures occur over time.

EXPLAINING ERRORS Errors are usually systematic and sometimes really predictable. Of course, not ALL errors are universal. Some of them are common only to learners who share the same mother tongue or whose mother tongues manifest the same linguistic property. Moreover, errors can have different sources, like in the case of errors of omission: for example, they leave out the articles “a” and “the” and leave the –s off plural nouns.

These are known as transfer errors. EXPLAINING ERRORS They also over-generalise forms that they find easy to learn (and practice). The use of “eated” instead of “ate” is an example of overgeneralization errors. Both errors of omission and overgeneralization are common in the speech of all L2 learners, irrespective of their L1. Other errors reflect learners’ attempts to make use of their L1 knowledge. These are known as transfer errors. No matter the type of error they make, learners “create” their own rules.

ERROR EVALUATION When we want to help learners learn a second language, we need to evaluate errors. Some errors can be considered more serious than others because they are more expected to interfere with the precision of what someone says. Teachers will want to focus their attention on these. Some errors, called global errors, break the general structure of a sentence and for this reason can make it difficult to practice. Others, known as local errors, influence only a single part of the sentence (for example, the verb) and are less likely to create any practicing problems.

Errors….. Compare these sentences learners produce: A man and a little boy was watching him VS. A man and a little boy were watching him