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Of course, not all errors are universal. Some errors are common anly to learners who share the same mother tongue or whose mother tongues manifest the
same linguistic property. Errors then can have different sources. Some errors seem to be universal,
reflecting learners’ attempts to make the task of learning and using the 1.2
simpler. I carners commit errors of omission.
d. Error evaluation. Some errors can be considered more serious than others because they are
more likely to interfere with the intelligibility of what someone says. Some errors, known as global errors, violate the overall structure of a sentence. Other errors,
known as local errors, affect only a single constituent in the sentence for example, the verb and are, perhaps, less likely to create any processing problems.
4. Types of Error
a. Omission
Omission errors are characterized by the absence of an item that must appear in a well-formed utterance. Content morphemes carry the bulk of the
referential meaning of a sentence: nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs. For example,
in the sentence
Mary is the president of the new company. The words, Mary, president, new and company are the content morphemes
that carry the burden of meaning. If one heard Mary president new company.
One could deduce a meaningful sentence, while if one heard is the of the
One couldn’t even begin to guess what the speaker might have had in mind. Language learners omit grammatical morphemes much more frequently
than content words. Omission errors are found in greater abundance and across a greater variety of morphemes during the early stages of L2 acquisition.
54
54
Heidi Dulay, et al., Language Two, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982, pp. 154—163.
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b. Additions
Addition errors are the opposite of omissions. They are characterized by the presence of an item which must not appear in a well-formed utterance.
Addition errors usually occur in the later stages of L2 acquisition, when the learner has already acquired some target language rules.
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According to Dulay, Burt and Krashen suggest this manifestation of error is the ‘result of all-too-
faithful use of certain rules and they suggest there are subtypes. First,
regularization , which involves overlooking exceptions and spreading rules to
domains where they do not apply, for example producing the regular buyed for bought. As one might expect, omission, being the mirror image of overinclusion,
tends to result from the converse, irregularization. This occurs when a
productive process such as affixation is not applied, but instead the form is wrongly assumed to be an exception to the general rule:dove for the preterite
form
√dived. A second subtype of oversuppliance is double marking, defined as
‘failure to delete certain items which are required in some linguistic constructions but not in others’. Here is an example: He doesn’t knows me contains a
redundant third person –s on the main verb know, redundant because the auxiliary do already carries the marker.
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c. Misformation
Misformation errors are characterized by the use of the wrong form of the morpheme or structure. In misformation errors the learner supplies something,
although it is incorrect. For example: The dog eated the chicken.
Dulay, Burt and Krashen also give the example: I seen her yesterday.
55
Heidi Dulay, et al., Loc. Cit., pp. 154—163.
56
Carl James, Op. Cit., pp. 107—108.
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It is indeed clear that seen for saw is use of the wrong form. What the learner who produced this error has done is not misform but misselect and should
be called misselection errors.
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A past tense marker was supplied by the learner; it was just not the right one. As in the case of additions, misformations are usually not random. Thus far,
three types of misformations have been frequently reported in the literature: 1
regularizations which involves overlooking exceptions and spreading rules to
domains where they do not apply; 2 archi-forms which define as the selection
of one member of a class of forms to represent others in the class. For example, out of the set thisthatthosethese are the learner might use only one: that; and 3
alternating forms define as fairly free alternation of various members of a class
with each other.
d. Misordering
Misordering errors are characterized by the incorrect placement of a morpheme or group of morphemes in an utterance. For example:
He is all the time late. All the time is misordered.
Misordering errors occur systematically for both L2 and L1 learners in constructions that have already been acquired, specifically simple direct and
embedded indirect questions. Students have made written misordering errors that are word-for-word translations of native language surface structures.
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5. Causes of Error
Errors in learning foreign language are inevitable, because the rules of learners’ mother tongue are very different from the rules of learners’ foreign
57
Carl James, Op. Cit., pp. 108—110.
58
Heidi Dulay, et al., Loc. Cit., pp. 154—163.
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language. To find out why certain errors are made, we must know about sources of error that learners made.
Douglas Brown distinguishes the sources of errors into three sources, they are: interlingual transfer, intralingual transfer, and context of learning.
a. Interlingual Transfer Interlingual transfer happened when the beginning stages of learning a
second language are influenced from the native language or interference. In these early stages, before the system of the second language is familiar, the native
language is the only previous linguistic system upon which the learner can draw. b. Intralingual transfer
Intralingual transfer causes within the target language itself. Researchers have found that the early stages of language learning are characterized by
predominance of interference interlingual transfer, but once learners have begun to acquire parts of the new system, more and more intralingual transfer –
generalization within the target language – is manifested. As learners progress in the second language, their previous experience and their existing subsumers begin
to include structures within the target language itself. c. Context of Learning
“Context” refers, for example, to the classroom with its teacher and its materials in the case of 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 errors 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 improperly contextualized.
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The similar opinion came from Peter Hubbard. He distinguishes the source of error into three parts:
59
H. Douglas Brown, Op. Cit,. pp. 223—227.
