The Contents are about

 Errors and error analysis

 Developmental patterns
 Variability in learner language
 Summary

The description focuses on kinds of errors learners make and how these errors change over time or it
may identify developmental patterns by describing the stages in the acquisition of particular
grammatical features such as past tense or it may examine the variability found in learner language.

Errors and error analysis

There are ggod reasons for focusing an errors.

 They are conspicuous feature of learner language, raising the important question of why do
learners make errors?
 It is useful for teachers to know what errors learners make.
 Paradoxically it is possible that making errors may actually help learners to learn when they self-
correct the errors they make.

To identify errors we have to compare the sentence as learners produce with what seem to be the
normal or correct sentences in the target language wich correspond with them. For example; Jean
says :

 A man and a little boy was watching them

The correct sentence should be :
 A man and a little boy were watching them

Identifying errors

 It is the first step to analyze errors made by learners.

Example:
 Jean is an adult French learner, he writes a paragraph of a story.
 A man and a little boy was watching him.
- was is supposed to were
- …. went in the traffic
- In is supposed to be into
 We can distinguish errors and mistakes made by by learners by checking the consistency of
learners performance.
 But whenever learner can do self-correct activity in producing the words then it means that he
posses the knowledge the correct form but just slipping up the mistake.

Describing errors

One 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.
Explaining errors

Errors are to a large extent, systematic and to a certain extent, predictable. Errors are not only
systematic, many of them are also universal. Thus, the kind of past tense error found in Jean’s speech
has been attested in speech of may learners.

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 linguist property.

Error evaluation