He would have saw them 4 Misordering
Misordering is the incorrect placement of a morpheme or group of morphemes in an utterance.
27
In simple words, put the words in utterance in the wrong order. For example , in the utterance
He is all the time late
all the time is misordered In declarative sentence
I don ‟t know what is that
is is misordered
c. Comparative taxonomy Comparative taxonomy is comparisons between the structure of l2
errors and certain other types of constructions. This type of error usually compares errors that are made by children learning the target language as
their first language and sentences in the learner ‟s mother tongue. These
comparisons have produced the two major error categories in this taxonomy: developmental errors and interlingual errors. The other
categories are ambiguous errors, which are classifiable as either developmental or interlingual, and other errors.
28
1 Developmental errors Developmental errors are errors similar to those made by children
learning the target language. For example, dog eat it. The omissions here are in the article and in the past tense marker. It is classified as a
developmental because these are also found in the speech of children learning English as their first language.
The important thing in the developmental errors is since children acquiring first language, they have no experienced learning a previous
language. So, the errors they make cannot possibly be due to any interference from another language.
27
Ibid, p. 162.
28
Ibid, pp. 163-172.
2 Interlingual errors Interlingual errors are similar in structure to a semantically
equivalent phrase or sentence in the learner ‟s native language. For
example, the man skinny. The error reflect to the word order of Spanish adjectival phrases e.g. el hombre flaco.
To identify interlingual errors, researchers usually translate the grammatical form of the learner
‟s phrase or sentence into the learner‟s first language to see if similarities exist.
3 Ambiguous errors Ambiguous errors are those that could be classified well as
developmental or interlingual. That is because the errors reflect the learners native language structure, and at the same time, they found in
the speech children acquiring a first language. For example, I no have a car.
4 Other errors Other errors are items that do not fit into other category. For example,
She do hungry. The speaker did not use her native Spanish structure or an L2 developmental form such as She hungry where the auxiliary is
omitted altogether.
d. Communicative effect taxonomy Communicative effect taxonomy focuses on distinguishing
between errors that seem to cause miscommunication and those that don ‟t.
There are two types of error according to communicative effect taxonomy, namely global error and local error.
29
1 Global errors Global errors are errors that affect overall sentence organization
significantly hinder communication. There are four types of global errors. They are:
a Wrong order of major constituents
29
Ibid, pp. 189-192.
e.g. English language use many people. b Missing, wrong, or misplaced sentence connectors
e.g.
if
not take the bus, we late for school c Missing cues to signal obligatory exceptions to pervasive syntactic
rules e.g. the student
‟s proposal
was
looked into
by
the principle. d Regularization of pervasive syntactic rules to exceptions
e.g. We amused that movie very much. That movie amused us very much.
2 Local errors Local errors are errors that affect single elements constituents in a
sentence. It does not usually hinder communication. These include errors in noun and verb inflections, articles, auxiliaries, and the
formation of quantifiers. For example, why like we each other? and why we like each other?
5. Procedure of Error Analysis
In this section, the writer will review the procedure for error analysis EA. In doing so, she will follow the steps identified by Corder .
30
1. Collection of a sample of learner language The earliest step for an EA is to collect a sample of learner
language. In order to do this, Corder in Ellis ‟s book distinguishes two kinds
of elicitation of errors.
31
There are: a Clinical elicitation where the informant is asked to produce data
b Experimental elicitation where special instrument are designed to elicit the data.
c In addition, Saville-Troike suggests that the data can be collected crosssectionally or longitudinally.
32
30
Ellis, op. cit., pp. 49-63.
31
Ibid
32
Muriel Saville-Troike, Second Language Acquisition, Singapore: Craft Print International Ltd, 2009. p 39.
2. Identification of errors An error can be defined as a deviation from the norms of the target
language. This definition raises a number of questions. They are: a. Should grammaticality serve as the criteria? For example, an utterance
may be grammatically correct but pragmatically unacceptable. b. Should there be a distinction between errors and mistakes?
c. Should errors be identified as overt and covert errors? d. Should infectious uses of the L2 be considered erroneous?
33
After indicating the possible difficulties of applying above definitions to actual data, Corder proposes the following procedure for
identifying errors:
34
a Normal interpretation, which occurs when the analyst is able to assign a meaning to an utterance on the basis of the rules of the target language
and in such cases an utterance is „not apparently erroneous‟, although it
may still be right „by chance‟.
b Authoritative interpretation, which involves asking the learner if available to say what the utterance means and, by doing so, make an
„authoritative reconstruction‟. c Plausible interpretation, which can be obtained by referring to the
context in which the utterance was produced or by translating the sentence literally into the learner
‟s L1.
3. Description of errors Ellis states that two descriptive taxonomies can be used in
describing errors: linguistic taxonomy and surface strategy taxonomy. Firstly, errors of morphology, syntax, and vocabulary can be categorized
under a linguistic taxonomy. Blaas found that there were three times as
33
Ellis, op. cit., pp. 51-52
34
Ibid., p. 52
many lexical errors as grammatical errors in one corpus of errors. It can be concluded that errors in vocabulary are more common in L2 learning.
35
Secondly, surface strategy taxonomy indicates how the surface structure is altered through operations as omissions, additions,
misinformation, or misordering Dulay, Burt, and Krashen cited in Ellis, 2008. Dulay, Burt, and Krashen also claim that this approach provides an
indication of the learner ‟s cognitive process in reconstructing the L2.
36
Ellis states that linguistic and surface strategy taxonomies of errors provide
pedagogic value i.e. indicates the frequency of the errors and therefore their need of attention in the class however they provide little information
on how L2 is acquired. Corder suggests that learner errors can be placed in three basic categories that can also provide information on how learner
acquires L2. They are:
37
a. Pre-systematic errors, which are made by a learner who is unaware of the existence of the particular rule in the target language, these errors
are random. b. Systematic errors, which occur when the learner has formed an
inaccurate hypothesis about the target language c. Post-systematic errors, which are the temporary forgetting of a point
that had been previously understood.
4. Explanation of errors As Ellis states, explanation of errors is an EA stage where the
source of the error is sought.
38
From a wider perspective of explaining the learner errors, Taylor suggests that the error sources can be:
psycholinguistic sources that concern the nature of L2 knowledge system and learner difficulties in target language production; sociolinguistic
sources that involve the learner ‟s ability to adjust hisher language in
35
Ibid., p. 54
36
Ibid., p. 55
37
Ibid., p. 56
38
Ibid., p. 57
accordance with the social context; epistemic sources that concern the learners
‟ lack of world knowledge, and discourse sources that involve problems in the organization of information into a coherent
„text‟.
39
Form a more specific viewpoint; Corder states that the explanation of errors is a matter for the psychology of second language learning
process. In agreement with this point, Richards suggests that there are three possible explanations for the learner errors. They are:
40
a. Interference errors. Language transfer from L1 causes interlingual errors. Moreover, in a more up to date work, Saville-Troike suggests
that the most likely causes of L2 errors are interlingual factors that result from negative transfer or interference from L1.
41
b. Intralingual errors. They do not reflect the features of the L1 and they are not attributable to cross-linguistic influence, but they result from
learning process itself such faulty generalisation, incomplete application of rules, and failure to learn conditions under which the rules apply.
42
c. Faulty teaching techniques or materials. Corder states that when learner errors do not fall into inter-lingual or intra-lingual categories they can
be assigned to this category of explanation. It is called false concept hypothesize which means the learners does not fully understand a
distinction in the target language.
43
5. Evaluation of errors The final stage in error analysis is to evaluate the errors. In so
doing, Burt suggests that errors can be evaluated as global errors that affect overall sentence organization, or local errors that affect single elements in a
sentence i.e. morphology or grammatical functors.
44
Ellis indicates to this
39
Ibid.
40
Ibid., p. 58
41
Saville-Troike. loc. cit.
42
Ellis, op. cit., p. 58
43
Ibid., p. 59
44
Ibid., pp. 63-64
