انجمن علمی زبان دانشگاه آزاد یزد

Steps in Error Analysis

Conducting error analysis involves a few steps. First, samples of a learner's language in oral or written forms are collected. Then, errors in the sample data are carefully identified for errors that are not only overt but also covert. In this step, teachers need to be aware that even well-formed sentences may contain errors. The meaning of the sentence can be different from what the learner intended, or the learner may not know the rules but accidentally made a well-formed utterance.

In some cases, the learner's utterance does not seem to have any errors in its sentence structure but may not be what a native speaker of the language would say in that context. One example given by Corder is “After an hour it was stopped.” This sentence does not appear to contain any errors, but if the learner used “it” to refer to “the wind,” then this sentence becomes erroneous.

How can one figure out the intended meaning of the learner's utterance? The best way is to ask the learner, if necessary, in their mother tongue. This way, the researcher or teacher can make an authoritative reconstruction of the sentence in the target language by asking what a native speaker of the target language would have said to express this meaning in that context. When making an authoritative reconstruction is not possible, the intended meaning needs to be inferred by the structure of the sentence and the context of how it was written or spoken; this is called plausible reconstruction.

This process denotes an important difference between contrastive analysis and error analysis. While in contrastive analysis, the learner's native language and the target language are compared; in error analysis, the learner's utterance, which is also known as interlanguage, is compared to the target language.

The next step is to linguistically describe the nature of the error by comparing the meaning of the sentence and the structure of the sentence, for instance, comparing errors of a grammatical category such as a missing article versus errors made on a morphology level or syntactic level. Then, linguistic and psycholinguistic explanations of the error need to be made by answering how and why the learner made such an error.

 Sage Reference Online