Errors of Speakers Acquiring a Second Language

While the concepts of ôerrorö and ômistakeö might seem to be interchangeable, within the realm of speech production they must be viewed as different types of events with different causes and remedies. Mistakes are nonsystematic occurrences, genuinely innocent events that include things like slips of the tongue and grammatical mistakes that result from a speaker losing track of a sentence û forgetting, for example, what the subject was before arriving at the predicate and so failing to make the two agree. While the most fluent speakers make mistakes, they can amend these mistakes once they are made aware of them. The mistakes that native speakers make in a language are analogous to mistakes that people all make in other fields û slipping on a wet floor or burning dinner. They are things that peop

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an unusual but not unique situation. Although linguistic competence is in large measure a question of style, a speakerÆs style may be so unrefined that it borders on mistake. While researchers û and lay people û generally consider people to be fluent in their native languages, an argument could be made that this is not necessarily so. However, issues of when inelegance becomes equal to a lack of fluency shall be set aside here to concentrate on categorizing the types of error that occur in non-native speakerÆs language. Once one moves beyond the issue of those stylistic excesses that border on error, there are a number of different types of error, including those of fluency and accuracy. Both may result from the fact noted by Richards and Rodgers (1986, p. 130) that the process of learning a second language is never the same as acquiring oneÆs native tongue. While one learns oneÆs first language holistically, secondary languages tend to be taught and so learned as a collection of separate and often barely related grammatical rules, lexical items and syntactical schema. Reflecting pedagogical categories and traditions, teachers and researchers categorize the errors that language learners make according to type. While this is proba
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Some common words found in the essay are:
, Types Errors, Richards Rodgers, George Bush, language acquisition, secondary language, native language, native speaker, native speakers, Teaching English, Routledge Ellis, mistakes native speakers, mistakes native, kinds mistakes, types error, Press Keller-Cohen, University Press, Language Acquisition, secondary language acquisition, university press, acquiring secondary language, rodgers 1986, richards rodgers 1986, broughton et al,
Approximate Word count = 1751
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)

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