SOURCES OF ERROR

(Summary)

Richards does not believe that the native language is the only source of
errors. He gives the following taxonomy of errors:
1. Errors due to interference involve instances of errors resulting from
thetransfer of grammatical and/or stylistic elements from the source
language to the target language.
2. Overgeneralization is that which covers instances where the learner creates
a deviant structure on the basis of his experience of some other structure in
the target language,
3. Performance errors involve unsystematic errors that occur as result of
memory lapses, fatigue, confusion, strong emotion etc.
4. Markers of transitional competence are errors that form a natural and
perhaps inevitable developemental sequence in the second language
learning process,
5. Errors involving strategies of communication and assimilation: these are
errors which result from an attempt to communicate in the target language
without having completely acquired the grammatical forms of the target
language,
6. Teaching- induced errors are errors resulting from pedagogical procedure
contained in the text or employed by the teacher.

Sources and Causes of Errors

The causes and the sources of the learner's errors are attributed to two
different factors by most of the scholars:
1. Interlingual Errors
Contrastivist have already established that the major source of errors in
learner's performance was directly attributed to the interference from the learner's
mother tongue. The learner while learning a second language transfer-elements of
his mother tongue whenever he feels difficulty to perform in the second language.
 Tarone (1969:16) has established following three types of transfer:
1. Negative transfer refers to situation in which the learner s attempt to use
inappropriate sound patterns and elements of the mother tongue in place of
the patterns of the target language.
2. Positive transfer refers to the situation where the learners do not face any
difficulty in producing an item which is common in the native and the
target languages.
3. Divergent negative transfer is another type of situation where the second
language learners perceive the target language elements as most difficult.
It takes place in the case of the purely non-cognate situation.
2. Intralingual Errors
Krashen (1976: 157), to him "many of the errors in the second language
acquisition are 'developmental' rather than solely a result of interference".
Intralingual errors may be classified into the following four categories:
1. Errors due to overgeneralization.
2. Error due to ignorance of rule restriction.
3. Errors due to incomplete application of rules.
4. Errors due the false concept hypothesis
Brown (1980 cited in Hasyim, 2002) further classified sources of errors
into the following categories:
1. Interference transfer: that is the negative influence of the mother tongue of
learner,
2. Intralingual transfer: that is the negative transfer of items within the target
language. In other words, the incorrect generalization of the rules within
the target language,
3. Context of learning: this overlaps both types of transfer. For example, the
classroom with the teacher and its materials in the case of school learning
or the social situation in the case of untutored second language learning. In
a classroom context, the teacher or the textbook can lead the learner to
make wrong generalization about the language, and
4. Communication strategies: it is obvious that communication strategy is the
conscious employment of verbal mechanisms for communicating an idea
when linguistic forms are not available to the learner for some reasons.
There are five main communication strategies, namely:
1. Avoidance,
2. Prefabricated patterns,
3. Cognitive and personality style,
4. Appeal to authority, and
5. Language switch (Brown, 1980 cited in Hasyim, 2002).