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2.3 Error Analysis
Human learning is fundamentally a process that involves the making of mistakes. Mistakes, misjudgements, miscalculations, and erroneous assumptions form an important aspect of learning virtually any skill or acquiring information. The fact that learners do make errors and 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.(H.D. 206)
When Interlanguage hypothesis was established, Error analysis (EA) took place of Contractive Analysis. The founder of Error Analysis was Corder, and it was employed since the late 1960s, as part of the methodology of the study of second language acquisition. Corder(104) pointed out that errors have theoretical and practical significance. The practice of error analysis is pided into three steps. Identifying error is the first step of error analysis. Corder(Yang Zhong 178) first distinguished errors from mistakes. Errors reflect gaps in a learner’s knowledge of the target language. The learner does not know what is correct. Mistakes reflect occasional lapses in performance. The learner knows the correct form but slip due to nervousness, carelessness or tiredness. Describing errors, the second step of error analysis, is categorizing errors grammatically. Corder(ibid 178) proposed four major categories: omission of some required elements; addition of some unnecessary or incorrect elements; selection of an incorrect element; and disordering of elements. These categories are highly generalized. Another way to describe errors is to classify them into grammatical categories. The later is more practicable for language teachers and provides more useful feedback to teaching. The final step, Explaining errors, is the task of tracing the source of errors. In terms of sources, errors are pided into intralingua errors and interlingua errors, based on whether they are caused by L1. Interlingua errors are caused by mother tongue interference.
The significance of Error Analysis was: it was accepted that human learning is fundamentally a process involving making errors. It has changed people’s mind about errors classified and described (Brown 210). Linguists have then paid more attention to errors.
2.4 New Findings of Language Transfer
After 1980s, linguistics like Kellerman and other linguists paved a new way in the study of second language acquisition and language transfer with cognitive science. Language transfer has become the hot topic again discussed in the field of applied linguistic and language learning. Linguists have reconsidered and re-estimated the value of contrastive analysis, trying to explore some new areas that remain untouched in contrastive analysis. This time, linguists no longer simply compared two language systems and had new ideas for the influence of mother language on target language. They have broadened their views and studied from more different perspectives such as from psychology perspective and social perspective and so on, with the aim to figure out the function of language transfer in language learning. Faerch and Kasper viewed language transfer as a psychological process, in which learners will develop and use their interlanguage stimulated by the pre-knowledge of mother language. They have proposed two kinds of transfer: transfer in communication and transfer in learning. Other linguists like Kellerman, and Palmer also proposed some theories like shared interlingual features and so on. Cognitive psychology has been successfully applied to the study of second language acquisition. And now it has formed a comprehensive and profound theory system from the previous partial one.
III. Error Analysis in Negative Transfer of Mother Tongue
In the second language acquisition process, there has been a relatively complete native language system in learner’s mind which influence the learner’s second language acquisition. This influence is called negative transfer of native language, and it is an undeniable phenomenon.