Understanding Learner Language Errors: Analysis and Implications

1. The Nature of Learner Language Bitha Pracandra R.S 2201410029 Rombel 7

2. Error and Error Analysis • A conspicuous feature of learner language • Useful to teachers to know what error learners make • Making errors may actually help learners to learn

3. Error and Error Analysis

4. Identifying Error • Comparing the sentences learners produce • Checking the consistency of learners’performance • A clear distinction between error and mistake may not be posssible

5. Describing Error • Classifying errors into grammatical categories • Identifying the general ways in which the learner’s utterances differ from reconstructed target language utterances • Omission, misordering, and misinformation

6. Explaining Error • Errors are not only systematic, many of them are also universal • Some errors seem to be universal, reflecting learners’ attempt to make the task of learning and using the L2 simpler

7. Error Evaluation Some Errors can be considered more serious than others because they are more likely to interfere with the intelligibility

8. Developmental Patterns

9. The early stages of L2 acquisition • A silent period They make no attempt to say anything to begin with. • Propositional simplification Learners find it difficult to speak in full sentences so they leave words out.

10. The order of acquisition • Researcher has shown that there is a definite accuracy order and that this remains more or less the same irrespective of the learners’ mother tongues, their age, and whether or not they have received formal language instruction. • It raises crucial theoretical questions as to whether L2 acquisition is the result of environmental or mental factors.

11. Sequence in acquisition • The acquisition of a particular grammatical structure must be seen as a process involving transitional constructions. • Acquisition follows a U-shaped course of development. • Learners pass through highly complex stages development.

12. Some implications • The discovery of common pattern makes L2 acquisition become systematic and, to large extent, universal, reflecting ways in which internal cognitive mechanism control acquisition, irrespective of the personal background of learners or the setting in which they learn. • The work on developmental patterns suggest that some linguistics features are inherently easier to learn than others.

13. Variability in Learner Language • Linguistic context The learners use one form while in other context they use alternate forms. Example: In Peru, George usually play football everyday. (=In Peru, George usually played football everyday.)

14. Variability in Learner Language • Situational context When native speakers of English are talking to friends, the learners tend to speak informally, using colloquial expressions. Example: My kid’s a real pain these days. But when they are talking to someone they do not know well, they tend to use formal language. Example: My daughter can be very troublesome these days

15. Variability in Learner Language • Psycholinguistic context • Learners have the opportunity to plan their production. • Learners do build variable systems by trying to map particular forms on to particular functions.

16. Variability in Learner Language • Form-function mappings • Learners make do not always conform to those found in the target language. • Learners try to make their available linguistic resources work to maximum effect by mapping one meaning on to one form.

17. Variability in Learner Language • Free variation The learners produced these two negative utterances in close proximity to each other, in the same context, while addressing the same person and with similar amounts of planning time. No look my card. Don’t look my card.

18. Variability in Learner Language • Fossilization • Many learners stop developing while still short of target-language competence. • Learners may succeed in reaching target-language norms in some types of language use (e.g : planned discourse) but not in others (e.g : unplanned discourse).

19. THANK YOU. . .