The Nature of Learner Language

    1.       Errors and error analysis

There are good reasons for focusing on errors. First, they are a conspicuous feature of learner language, raising the important question of ‘why do learners make errors?’ Second, it is useful for teachers to know what errors learners make. Third, paradoxically, it is possible that making errors may actually help learners  to learn when they self-correct the errors they make.

a.       Identifying errors

The first step in analysing learner errors is to identify them. We need to distinguish errors and mistakes. Errors reflect gaps in a learner’s knowledge; they occur because the learner does not know what is correct. Mistakes reflect occasional lapses in performance; they occur because, in a particular instance, the learner is unable to perform what he or she knows.

b.      Describing errors

Once all the errors have been identified, they can be described and classified into types. There are several ways of doing this. One  way is to classify errors into grammatical categories. Another way might be to try to identify general ways in which the learners’ utterances differ from the reconstructed target-language utterances. Such ways include omission, misinformation, and misordering.

c.       Explaining errors

The identification and description of errors are preliminaries to the much more interesting task of trying to explain why they occur. Errors are, to a large extent, systematic and, to a certain extent, predictable. Errors are not only systematic; many of them are also universal. Of course, not all errors are universal. Some errors are common only to learners who share the same mother tongue or whose mother tongues manifest the same linguistic property.

d.      Error evaluation

Where the purpose of the error analysis is to help learners learn an L2, there is a need to evaluate errors. Some errors, known as global errors, violate the overall structure of a sentence and for this reason may make it difficult to process. Other errors, known as local errors, affect only a single constituent in the sentence and are, perhaps, less likely to create any processing problems.

    2.       Developmental patterns

a.       The early stages of L2 acquisition

We can find out how a language is learned as a natural, untutored process by investigating what learners do when exposed to the L2 in communicative settings. When learners do begin to speak in the L2 their speech is likely to manifest two particular characteristics. One is the kind of formulaic chunks which we saw in the case studies. The second characteristic of early L2 speech is propositional simplification.

b.      The order of acquisition

To investigate the order of acquisition, researchers choose a number of grammatical structures to study (for example, progressive –ing, auxiliary be, and plural –s). They then collect samples of learner language and identify how accurately each feature is used by different learners.

c.       Sequence of acquisition

When learners acquire a grammatical structure they do so gradually, moving through a series of stages en route to acquiring the native-speaker rule. The acquisition of a particular grammatical structure, therefore, must be seen as a process involving transitional constructions.

d.      Some implications

The discovery of common patterns in the way in which learner language changes over time is one of the most important findings of SLA. The work on developmental patterns is important for another reason. It suggests that some linguistic features are inherently easier to learn than others.

    3.       Variability in learner language

Two important factors that account for the systematic nature of variability is linguistic context. In one context they use one form while in other contexts they use alternate forms. Another is the psycholinguistic context-whether learners have the opportunity to paln their production.