Objectives of the study and

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.