ELTWeekly Newsletter Vol. 3 Issue#90 | June 20, 2011

Abstract

EFL learners’ errors are a major area of study in the field of contrastive linguistics and SLA research. In this article, a roughly representative account of the significance and importance of errors has been provided. Various volumes by specialists in applied linguistics, language teaching, and SLA research have been used as authoritative sources of information to provide as comprehensive an account of interlanguage errors as possible. In the course of the discussion it becomes clear that the sources of errors are no longer sought merely in the language learners’ mother tongue ( i.e., negative transfer from L1 ). But, unlike the traditional beliefs, it has become evident that mother tongue interference is not the sole source of errors, and there are many other sources from which errors originate. In this article, the writer has tried not only to show the importance of errors in EFL learners’ speech and writing but also to present a clearly-depicted and comprehensive framework regarding the sources of these errors so as to help readers especially teachers to recognize such sources easily and quickly and be able both to predict the critical interlingual and intralingual aspects which contribute to learners’ erroneous linguistic behavior and to deal with their errors effectively and efficiently.

Key words : learners’ errors, sources of error, contrastive analysis, L1 transfer/mother tongue interference, interlingual and intralingual errors (more…)