The teacher realizes that the errors which are made by the learner in language learning process should be analyzed carefully because with
this analysis, the teacher can identify the difficult areas that are faced by the learners, so it can be used in making learning materials and strategies.
“Error analysis was conceived and performed for its „feedback‟ value in designing pedagogical materials and strategies.”
4
c. The Types of Error
According to Corder, error is divided into four categories: error of omission, error of addition, error of selection, and error of ordering
5
. Here are the explanations.
1 The Error of Omission
Error of omission is the absence of an item that should appear. “Errors of omission where some element is omitted which
should be present.”
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The learner omits the item that should appear in the good utterance.
“Omission has two types of morphemes that are omitted more than others. They are content morphemes and
grammatical morphemes.”
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Content morphemes are morphemes that have meaning like nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs.
Grammatical morphemes are little words that have minor play in sentences like noun and verb inflections, articles, auxiliaries, and
preposition. Example: Angelina is an actress
4
Jacek Fisiak, Contrastive Linguistics and the Language Teacher, Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1981, p. 221
5
S. P. Corder, Error Analysis and Interlanguage, New York: Oxford University Press, 1982, p. 36.
6
Ibid.
7
Heidi Dulay, Marina Burt, and Stephen Krashen, Language Two, New York: Oxford University Press, 1982, p. 150.
From the explanation and example above, the word Angelina and actress are content morphemes because Angelina and
actress is noun and has a mayor meaning. The words is and an are grammatical morphemes because they are verb auxiliaries and
article, and they are also play a minor meaning in that sentence. “Omit grammatical morphemes are more frequently than
content words .”
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It is caused by the grammatical morphemes are more complex, for example in using tenses, the learner should be
aware of the addition of the ending of the verb -ed,- ing, -s correctly. Omit content morphemes are typically made by the
learner in the early stage. It happens because the learner still has limitation of the vocabulary which is used in the sentences.
2 The Error of Addition
Addition is the opposite of omission. Addition is ”the presence of an item that must not appear in well-formed
utter ences”
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. In addition, the learners add the utterance which is not needed in a sentence, or the learners add some unnecessary
element. For example:
She didn’t studied yesterday From the example above, the learner want to tell that she
didn’t study yesterday. She knows that to tell the past event, she has to use the past verb, but she puts two items for the same
features; didn’t and studied.
8
Ibid., p. 155.
9
Rod Ellis, The Study of Second Language Acquisition, 2
nd
Edition, New York: Oxford University Press, 2008, p. 52.
