3. Causes of Error
According to Lightbown and Spada,error is the result of learners first language transfer. But not all the errors are produced from the first language.
Many errors are better to be explained in the term of learners‘ developing knowledge of the target language rather than trying to transfer form of their first
language.
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A different type of errors is represented in sentences like did he comed, what you are doing, he coming from India, make him to do it, I can to speak
English, etc. These kinds of errors often occur to learners with various language backgrounds. They are called intralingual and developmental errors. Intralingual
and developmental errors can reflect the learner‘s competence particularly and also can describe some of language acquisition characteristic.
Intralingual errors consist of faulty generalization, incomplete application of rules, and failure to learn conditions that describe the characteristic of rule
learning. In the other hand, developmental error is often made by the learner when shehe tries to make hypothesis about English from herhis limited knowledge of
target language. The causes of intralingual and developmental errors are:
a. Overgeneralization
Overgeneralization includes example of different structure in target language made by the learner based on his knowledge of other structure. In
general, it involves the making of one different structure in place of two common structures. Lightbown and Spada define overgeneralization
Overgeneralization is an error made by mixing two or more different structure in target language based on the learner knowledge, or using a form
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Patsy M. Lightbown, Nina Spada, How Language are Learned, Third Edition, New York: Oxford University Press, 2006, p.78-79
of structure in which it does not belong to, for example the –s ending on the
verb in ‗I plays‘.
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b. Ignorance of rule restrictions
Ignorance of rule restriction is an error caused by ignoring the rule restrictions of existing structures. Some rule-restriction errors may be
accounted for in terms of analogy; other instances may result from the rote learning of rules.
c. Incomplete application of rules
In incomplete application of rules, the occurrence of structures whose deviancy represents the degree of development of the rules required to
produce acceptable utterances. There are two possible causes, first is the use of questions in the classroom, where the learner is encouraged to repeat the
question or the part of it in the answer. Second, is the fact that the learner may discover that he can communicate perfectly adequately using deviant
forms. On the other hand, although young children learners appear to be
able to learn a foreign language quite easily and to reproduce new sounds very effectively, most of older learners experience considerable difficulty.
The sound system and the grammar of the first language impose themselves on the new language and this lead to a ‗foreign‘ pronunciation, faulty
grammatical patterns, and occasionally, to the wrong choice of vocabulary.
d. False concepts hypothesized
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