Errors in Second Language Learning

How does one identify errors? In a paper presented at the American Language Institute, University of Southern California, Paul Schachter (1974) expressed his belief that, whereas previous syntactic contrastive analysis had emphasized differences, one should not overlook similarities between languages. In the interpretation of a study of Farsi-speaking and Arabic-speaking students, he found that the speakers felt comfortable using the fairly similar restrictive relative clauses construction and used it with about the same frequency as English speakers, but made errors because they had not learned to observe some minor ways in which the English construction differed from their own. Schachter was of the opinion that both Contrastive Analysis and Error Analys

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e acquired behavior or produce aberrant behavior, in which case one is dealing with a mistake rather than an error, and remediation ought to be essentially differentiated. The best students often fail examinations because they "freeze". Ellis (1965, p. 3) stresses the different forms of transfer, transfer being the influence of experience or performance in one task onto a subsequent task. If transfer of learning facilitates the learning of the new task, one has positive transfer. Much of Farsi, for instance, is straight Arabic: there is identity of form and substance and, according to the Skaggs-Robinson Hypothesis, there results optimal transfer performance. On the other hand, if past performance inhibits or disrupts new performance, the result is negative transfer. A bobbing of the head from side to side implies rejection in English, acceptance in Hindi. Zero-transfer occurs when no effect takes place between one task and another. Negative transfer is a cause of error because it is inappropriate in terms of communication. Another source of errors occurs between spoken and written languages. Common in first language performance and, perforce even more so in second language performance, are errors of transcoding from one symbolic
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 3528
Approximate Pages = 14 (250 words per page)