Significance of the Study

He used the past tense of the verb „contain‟ correctly. However, in the final sentence he says: - The basket contain a snake Making what seems to be a past tense error. But clearly, the student knows what the past tense of „contain‟ is as he has already used it correctly once. His failure to say „contained‟ in the last sentence, then, might be considered a mistake The question arises as to how errors and mistakes can be distinguished. One way might be to check the consistency of learners‟ performance. If they consistently substitute „contain‟ for „contained‟ this would indicate a lack of knowledge-an error . However, if they sometimes say „contain‟ and sometimes „contained‟, this would suggest that they possess knowledge of the correct form and are just slipping up- a mistake. Another way might be to ask learners to try to correct their own deviant utterance. Where they are unable to, the deviations are errors; where they are successful, they are mistakes. 13 Another examples using this as a test, the sample of learner language one day an Indian gentleman arrived in England by plane …….the man said to the little boy, when the little boy was speaking with the traveler, the thief took the big suitcase and went out quickly. The policeman was in the corner whistle but it was too late. This example suggests that the learners failure to use the correct form of the simple past tense for example whistle instead of whistled constitutes a mistake rather than an error because other forms are correctly marked arrived, said, took, went out. A learner is considered to make mistakes when he or she has deviation. A better way of determining where a particular deviation is an error or a mistake is to consult the learner, if the learner is able to self-correct the deviant form, it can be classified as a mistake. From the explanation above, it can be synthesized that errors happened because of lack of knowledge, constantly occurred, and it cannot be self corrected, while mistakes happened because of carelessness, temporary lapses of memory, slips of the tongue, or other performance failure, and it can be self corrected. 13 Ibid., p. 17.

3. Description of Errors

There are many categories for describing errors have been identified. According Dulay, Burt, and Krashen, there are four types of errors based on the surface strategy taxonomy. They are omission, addition, misformation, misordering. 14 a. Omission Omission errors are characterized by the absence of an item that must appear in a well-formed utterance. It is found in greater abundance and across a greater variety of morphemes during the early stages of second language acquisition. This error, the learner may omit noun and verb inflections the –s in plural form of birds, -ed in looked, the –ing in cooking, etc. For example: 1 I bought three doll for my daughter two days ago. omission –s for plural form – dolls 2 I study Math last night. omission –ed for inflectional verb – studied b. Addition Addition errors are characterized by the presence of an item which must not appear in a well-formed utterance. Addition errors usually occur in later stages of second language acquisition, when the learner has already acquired some target language rules. There are three types of addition error: 1 Double Marking. It occurs when there are two or more items with same feature in a sentence. For example: My father doesn‟t goes to the office this morning, because he is sick doesn’t and goes are the same feature for simple present tense. The correct form of that sentence is: My father doesn‟t go to the office this morning, because he is sick. 2 Regularization. It occurs when there are erroneously added to exceptional items which are typically added to linguistic items. For examples, the verb eat, the past form is not eated, but ate; the noun sheep, the plural form is sheep, not sheeps. 3 Simple addition. It is the use of an item which should not appear in a well- 14 Heidi Dulay, Marina Burt, and Stephen Krashen, Language Two, New York: Oxford University Press, 1982, p. 154-162.