4. False Concepts Hypothesizedis the faulty comprehension of distinctions in the target language causes developmental errors.
James also gives the four major categories of errors and the sources, which are interlingual, intralingual, induced error, and compound and ambiguous:
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1. Interlingual, errors are caused by mother tongue interference. The persistence of the first language influences the learners in using the target
language. 2. Intralingual, errors are caused by target language. Some rules of the target
language make the learners fail to distinct each other’s. 3. Induced Error, errors are caused by material-induced error, teacher-talk
induced error, exercise-based induced error, errors induced by pedagogical priorities, look-up errors.
4. Compound and ambiguous, a lexical and phonological causes. It has been assumed that errors as being caused only by the interference of
the first language. However, some linguists above have explained that the target language and other sources may cause errors as well.
3. The Definition of Er r or Analysis
In learning language process, making error is unavoidable for a learner because error is natural part of language learning. Student cannot learn a language
without first systematically committing errors, and a study of students’ errors is part of the systematic study of the students’ language.
According to Dulay, studying students’ errors serves two major purposes is providing data that can be used to make the nature of the language learning
process and giving some hints to the teachers and curriculum developers which types of error that prevent the learners to communicate effectively.
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11
Carl James, Errors in Language and Use: Exploring Error Analysis,London: Longman, 1998, pp. 179-200.
12
Heidi Dulay, op. cit., p. 138.
It is important to investigate the errors that students made in order to enable the learners to communicate effectively and to prevent the learners to make
the same errors. Brown claims, “learning is fundamentally a process that involves the
making of mistakes, misjudgments, miscalculations, and erroneous assumptions form an important of aspect learning virtually any skill or acquiring
information
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”. It means that errors or mistakes are inevitable. In learning language, errors and mistakes are considered as the part of process in acquiring
the target language. It is clearly different from Contrastive Analysis CA that making
comparison between the first language and the target language. Error Analysis focuses the errors by making comparison between the target language and the
target language itself. As Dulay states “the Error Analysis EA movement can be characterized
as an attempt to account for learners’ errors that could not be explained or predicted by Contrastive Analysis CA or behaviorist theory, and to bring the
field of applied linguistic into step with the current climate of theoretical opinion
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”. Error Analysis has shown up to criticize what Contrastive Analysis. Corder claims that Error Analysis EA has two functions; theoretical and
practical.
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a. The theoretical aspect of error analysis is the methodology applied to investigate the process of teaching learning.
b. The practical aspect of error analysis has a function in building the remedial action.
Rephrasing what Corder mentions above, Error Analysis EA has given a contribution to language teaching learning at both theoretical and practical
aspects, and it enables teachers to find out the sources of error and to deal against them.
13
Brown, op. cit., p. 257.
14
Dulay, op. cit., p. 141.
15
S. P. Corder, Error Analysis and Interlanguage, New York: Oxford University Press, 1981, p. 45.
