Errors of Speakers Acquiring a Second Language

Before one can understand or help to eliminate the kinds of errors that speakers make when acquiring a secondary language, it is necessary first of all to understand the kinds of mistakes that occur in all speech production. The kinds of mistakes that all speakers make from time to time are not of especial interest to the teacher or researcher of second language acquisition because they exist within the universe of language at large rather than within the smaller universe of second language acquisition. They can - and should - be weeded out as a sort of background noise for the researcher or teacher who wishes to concentrate on the issue of secondary language acquisition.

While the concepts of "error" and "mistake" 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 - 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 - 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 speaker's style may be so unrefined that it borders on mistake. While researchers - and lay people - 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 speaker's 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 one's native tongue. While one learns one's 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

Category: Psychology - E