Richards, et al. gave
the same opinion that “An Intralanguage error is one which results from faulty or partial learning of the target language, rather than
from language transfer.”
9
Intralingual errors may be caused by the influence of one target language item upon another. For example a learner may produce He is
comes, based on a blend of the English structures He is coming or He comes.
c. Context of learning
“Context” refers, for example, to the classroom with its teacher and its materials in the case of school learning or the social situation in the case of
untutored second language learning. In a classroom context the teacher or the textbook can lead the learner to make faulty hypotheses about the language.
Students often make error because of a misleading explanation from the teacher, faulty presentation of a structure or word in a textbook, or even because of a
pattern that was rotely memorized in a drill but properly contextualiuzed.
10
As quoted by Hubbard, Corder said that there are three major causes of error. Those are mother tongue interference, overgeneralizations and errors
encouraged by teaching material or method.
11
a. Mother-tongue interference
Although young children appear to be able to learn a foreign language quite easily and to reproduce new sounds very effectively, most older learners
experience considerable difficulty. The sound system phonology and the grammar of the first language impose themselves on the new language and this
leads to a foreign pronunciation, faulty grammatical patterns and occasionaly to
the wrong choice of vocabulary. b.
Overgeneralization
The mentalist theory claims that the learner processes new language data in his mind and produces rules for its production, based on the evidence. Where the
data are inadequate or the evidence only partial, such rules may well produce the
9
Richard, et al., op. cit., p. 187.
10
Brown, op. cit., p. 266.
11
Peter Hubbard, et al., A Training Course for TEFL, New York: Oxford University Press, 1983, pp. 140
—142.
