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4 Communicative Effect Taxonomy
Different from Surface Strategy Taxonomy and comparative taxonomy, communicative effect taxonomy deals with the effect of errors from the point of
view of readers or listeners Dulay, Burt, Krashen, 1982. However, in the application, the errors based on communicative effect taxonomy, such as omission
of article “the” and the misused of “many and much”, do not really affect the message delivery.
7. Sources of Errors
To answer the second research question about the sources of errors in interrogative word question constructions made by the students of PMat 2010, the
researcher refers to particular theories related to the sources of errors in using language.
a. Kinds of Sources
James 1998 as cited in Heydari and Bagheri 2012 proposes a theory that there are four sources of errors in using language. First is mother tongue
influence which interferes in the target language. Second is lack understanding of target language like false analogy, incomplete rule application, exploiting
redundancy, overlooking
the exceptional
rules, overgeneralization
or simplification. Third is communication strategy. Somehow, language learners
make errors in applied linguistic because they consider that the focus of language is the meaning even though the sentence they made is incorrect. Fourth is
misleading source of language learning. Teacher explanation, examples, and sources of material
can be the factors that cause students’ errors.
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On the other hand, Touchie claims that errors can be caused by developmental factors such as avoidance. Avoidance is the condition in which
language learners either prefer to use simpler structures or creatively create several new structures to avoid producing difficult syntactic structures 1986.
In addition, Richards 1974 points that interference of mother tongue is the strongest source of errors. It makes language learners have difficulties in
applying the rules of second or foreign language. Besides, strategies in language acquisition, and also teaching technique and procedure can be counted as the
source of students’ errors in applied linguistics. Moreover, according to Dulay, Burt, and Krashen 1982, the errors
caused by lack understanding of target language are considered as the impact of lack coordination of basic knowledge of the target language. There are three
possible conditions of lack coordination. First, the language learners probably have not learned about the auxiliary movement which exchanges the position of
subject and auxiliary. Second, the language learners perhaps leave the auxiliary that has been used in the statement or sentence before it is inverted to question.
Third, the language learners may not insert tense-carrying element, such as
do, does,
and
did
when there is no auxiliary available in the statement.
8. Error Analysis
