Lapses, mistakes and
errors
Errors that
are made by learners are linguistically different with errors that are made by
a native speaker. Usually, the mistakes made by native speaker are changes of
plan, where he starts an utterance, breaks off and starts another one with a
different structure. For example:
It’s a bit—it’s hasn’t—I mean, I wouldn’t really care to
have one just like that …
Native speaker may also make mistakes that are called
“syntactic blends”. He may convert one structure into another without breaking
off. Here is the example:
One wonders…why this country should support foreigners in
our already overcrowded prisons…for the non payment of fines of which they had
no opportunity to pay.
The redundant of appears
to arise from a confusion of two constructions:
…no opportunity of
paying
…no opportunity to pay
The third one is that “slips of the tongue” or “slips of the
pen”. For example:
It didn’t bother me in the sleast…slightest
But those frunds…funds have been frozen
…of Peester Ustinov
Native speakers frequently make slips or false starts or
confusions of structure. They are called lapses. Then the term error is to
refer to those features of the learner’s utterances which differ from those of
any native speaker. Lapses have no immediate relevance to the problem of
language learning. It may not always be easy to distinguish between a learner’s
errors and his/her lapses.
Expressive and receptive errors
Both
expressive and receptive behaviors require a knowledge of formation rules. For
language teacher, it is much easier to detect imperfect knowledge in the case
of expressive behavior. Receptive behavior mostly has no observable behavioral
concomitants. The hearer does not always demonstrate unambiguously that he has
understood fully what we say. Even when we have reason to suspect a failure of
comprehension, we still may have great difficulty in determining which
particular linguistic features of our utterance have been misinterpreted. Expressive
and receptive processes are not mirror images of each other. But there is a
general belief amongst teachers that a learner’s receptive abilities normally
exceed his productive abilities.
The practical uses of
error analysis
The
practical use of the analysis of errors is to the teacher. By using the
analysis of errors, teacher can see the effectiveness of his teaching
materials, his teaching techniques, and show him which syllabus that he has
been taught that need further attention. That is why errors analysis is very
useful because they give feedback to the teacher. They can also help teacher to
decide whether he can move on to the next item or he must devote more time to
the item he has been working on.
Errors
The
assumption underlying the description of errors is that they are evidence of a
system, not the system of the target language, but the system of some “other”
language. To describe that “other” language is precisely the theoretical
objective of error analysis. Linguistic theory provides the language for
talking about the nature of errors. They are used to compare the language of
the learner with that of the native speaker, or even to describe the difference
between what the learner did and what a native speaker would have done in the
same circumstances.
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