The Difference Between the Terms of ‘Error’ and ‘Mistake’

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CHAPTER 2. REVIEW OF RELATED LITERATURE

This chapter discusses the theories related to this study. They include the difference between the terms of error and mistake, the source of errors, the definition of error analysis and its functions, the definitions of grammatical errors, the types of error and the example based on surface strategy taxonomy, the definitions of writing, and a recount text writing definition and its generic structure.

2.1 The Difference Between the Terms of ‘Error’ and ‘Mistake’

Errors mean some faults made by learners either in a written or a spoken form. It is an unavoidable part of language learning. Everyone tends to make errors in their learning process especially for foreign English learners. According to Dulay et al. 1982:139, errors can be classified into two kinds, they are performance and competence errors. Performance errors which are called “mistakes” are caused by fatigue and inattention while competence errors are caused by lack of knowledge that are called “errors”. The term errors and mistakes have different perspective so that it is important to know the distinction on both of them to avoid the readers’ misunderstanding. It is in line with what Ellis 1999:51 states that: “An error takes place when the deviation arises as a result of lack of knowledge. It represents a lack of competence. A mistake occurs when learners fail to perform their competence. That is, it is the result of processing problems that prevent learners from accessing their knowledge of a target language rule and cause them to fall back on some alternative, non-standard rule that they find easier to access.” Errors are commonly made by English foreign learners because they lack of competence but mistakes are made by both native and non-native speakers who are normally capable of recognizing and correcting such lapses or mistakes. Those mistakes occur as the result of temporary imperfection of the known knowledge in the 7 process of producing speech. As Tavakoli 2012:117 argued that mistake is either a random guess or a slip that it is a failure to utilize a known system correctly. Other linguists, Gass and Selinker 2008:102 also differentiate error from mistake which are akin to slip of the tongue and generally one-time-only events. On the other hand, an error is systematic that is likely to occur repeatedly and is not recognized by the learner as an error. The learners who make mistakes usually are able to recognize it as a mistake and correct it if necessary. From the explanation above, it could be concluded that errors are the learner s’ fault production caused by lack of knowledge and they tend to occur in a long time if they are not corrected immediately. Errors cannot be self-corrected by the learners while mistakes can be self- corrected because they are just learners’ temporarily fault caused by the slip of the tongue or carelessness. For example, a student writes “She have a new bag”. In this case, he writes the verb “have” instead of “has. If he always ignores the subject-verb agreement rules in his writing, it can be assumed as an error. However, if he can write the correct one in different occasion, it means that he makes a mistake. Errors are only errors from a teachers or a researchers perspective, not from the learners perspectives. As Ellis 1997:17 states that error reflects gaps in a learners knowledge; they occur because the learner does not know what is correct. The problem was, it was not easy for the researcher to determine between which one was the student’s error and which one was the student’s mistake. It needed a long process to always keep an eye on the students’ work to know whether they always make the same faults or not so that the researcher could determine between the learners’ errors and the learners’ mistakes. Considering that, the researcher did not mak e a distinction between an error and a mistake. All the students’ errors of writing were assumed as errors which deviated from English grammar rules since the students could not do self-correction and were analyzed in this research. 8

2.2 The Sources of Errors