Ways to Increase powers of Description

22 lack of knowledge and mistake is the students possess knowledge of the correct form and are just slipping up. Brown also gives the similar opinion about error and mistake. According to him, an error is a noticeable deviation from the adult grammar of a native speaker, reflects the competence of the learner. And a mistake is a “slip” a failure to utilize a known system correctly, and mistakes can be self-corrected. 50 According to Jacek Fisiak, “Mistakes are deviations due to performance factors such as memory limitations, spelling pronunciations, fatigue, emotional strain, etc. Errors, on the other hand, are systematic, consistent deviances characteristic of the learner’s linguistic system at a given stage of learning. 51 Then the writer concluded that students made error because lack of knowledge, assert learners’ competence, and consistent deviances characteristic. It cannot be self corrected. The students do not know what is the correct while mistakes happen because lapses of memory, slip of tongue and memory limitations. It can be self corrected. 3 . Step of Error Analysis Error analysis has methodology involving some procedures to do. There are number of steps taken in concluding an error analysis. a. Collect data. Although this is typically done with written data, oral data can also serve as a base. b. Identify errors. What is the error e.g., incorrect sequence of tenses, wrong verb, or singular verb form with plural subject? c. Classify errors. Is it an error of omission? Is it an error in addition? 50 H. Douglas Brown, Principles of Language Learning and Teaching, fourth edition, New York: Longman, 2000, p. 21. 51 Jacek Fisiak, Contrastive Linguistics and the Language Teacher, New York: Pergamon Press, 1981, p. 224. 23 d. Quantity errors. How many errors of omission occur? How many errors of addition? e. Analyze source. Interlingual or intralingual transfer. f. Remediate. Based on the kind and frequency of an error type, pedagogical intervention is carried out. 52 Rod Ellis suggests the following procedures for analyzing learners errors are: 53 a. Identifying errors. The first step in analyzing learner errors is to identify them. To identify errors we have to compare the sentences learners produce with what seem to be normal or ‘correct’ sentences in the target language which correspond with them. b. Describing errors. Once all the errors have been identified, they can be described and classified into types. There are several ways of doing this. One way is to classify errors into grammatical categories. We could gather all the errors relating to verbs and then identify the different kinds of verb errors. Another way might be to try to identify general ways in which the learners’ utterances differ from the reconstructed target-language utterances. c. Explaining errors. The identification and description of errors are preliminaries to the much more interesting task of trying to explain why they occur. Errors are, to a large extent, systematic and, to a certain extent, predictable. Errors are not only systematic; many of them are also universal. In fact, most, if not all learners go through a stage of learning where they substitute the simple from of the verb for the past tense from. 52 Susan M. Gass and Larry Selingker, Second Language Acquisition An Introductory Course, 3 rd ., New York and London: Routledge Taylor Francis Group, 2008, p. 103. 53 Rod Ellis, Op. Cit., pp. 15—20.