An error is a noticeable deviation from the adult grammar of a native speaker, reflecting the interlanguage competence of the learner.
10
Julian Edge, in Harmer 2001, suggested that mistake can be divided into two broad categories: ‘slip’ and ‘attempts’. Slips are mistakes
which students can correct themselves once the mistake has been pointed out to them, while attempts are mistakes committed when a student tries to
say something but does not yet know the correct way of saying it.
11
For this paper the writer adopt the definition of genuine errors that caused by lack of knowledge about English or by lack of incorrect
hypothesis about English. So, if the student can not correct himself when he was challenged, it means he made an error, but he made mistake if he
can correct himself when he was challenged because a mistake is caused by temporary lapses of memory, confusion, slips of the tongue and so on.
2. The Error Analysis
It is impossible that learners never make some errors in language learning process. According to Peter Hubbard et.al., “The behaviorists
regarded language learning as the acquisition of skills, comparable to the process of learning to do something practical, like driving a car. The
complex skill was broken down into a series of habits, which ere drilled until they became automatic and unthinking. The habits were taught is a
series of small steps, so as to avoid errors.” In other words, to achieve the English acquisition, the students must get through some errors first, and
then automatically they can learn from their own errors. The teacher will also need to know which part of the subject matter
that most students do some errors and most students do not. Finding out the learners’ errors then analyzing it is called Error Analysis.
10
Muhammad Farkhan, An Introduction to Linguistics, Jakarta: UIN Jakarta Press, 2006, p. 149.
11
Jeremy Harmer, The Practice of English Language Teaching 3
rd
Edition, London:
Longman, 2001, p. 99.
There are many definition of error analysis. Oxford Concise Dictionary
defined Error analysis is “The analysis for practical but also potentially for scientific ends, of errors made by students learning another
language”.
12
Longman Dictionary of language teaching and Applied Linguistics defines error analysis as the study and analysis of the error made by the
second language learners.
13
The fact that learners do make errors and that these errors can be observed, analyzed, and classified to reveal something of the system
operating within the learner, led to a surge of study of learners’ errors, called error analysis. Error analysis become distinguished from contrastive
analysis by its examination of errors attributable to all possible sources, not just those which result from negative transfer of the native language.
Error analysis easily superseded contrastive analysis, as we discovered that only some of the errors a learner makes are attributed to the mother
tongue, that learners do not actually make all the errors that contrastive analysis predicted they should, and that learners from disparate language
backgrounds tend to make similar errors in learning one target language.
14
Corder stated, “Error analysis confirms or disproves the predictions of the theory lying behind bilingual comparison.
15
In this sense error analysis is an experimental technique for validating the theory of transfer.
But error analysis goes beyond this; it aims at telling us something, about the psycholinguistic processes of language learning. We hope to be able to
draw certain conclusion about the strategies adopted by the learner in the
12
Mathews, P. H, Oxford Concise Dictionary of Linguistic, New York: Oxford University Press, 1997, p. 117.
13
JC Richard, John Platt, and Heidi Platt, Longman Dictionary of Language Teaching and Applied Linguistic,
London: Longman, 1992, p. 127.
14
Farkhan, An Introduction..., p. 149.
15
S. P. Corder, Error Analysis and Interlanguage, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981, p. 35.
process of learning. In this sense, error analysis is part of the methodology of the psycholinguistic investigation of language learning.
According to definition above the writer conclude that error analysis is an effort to get in information about the students’ difficulty in
learning a language especially to write it.
3. The Types of Error
