1.1 Definition of error.

There are many definitions of “error” made so far and there seems to be no consensus on a single definition. Researchers have rightly become aware of the importance of speaking context, the intention of the teacher and student and the prior learning of the pupils in the process of deciding what an error is. Therefore, researchers dealing with error treatment have chosen the definition applying to their own research context. For example, an “oral error” is broadly defined as a form unwanted by the teacher in the given teaching/learning context. Also, the term “corrective feedback” needs to be defined. It is the teacher is reaction that transforms, disapproves or demands improvement of the learner utterance. Another term in need of clarification is “uptake” that refers to different types of pupils’ responses following the feedback, including responses with repair of the non-target items as well as utterances still in need of repair. The correction may come from the pupil, a peer or the teacher. [13; 583-593]

After some key definitions, the issue of oral error correction should be approached from a historical perspective to see the progress made so far. Traditionally, when the audio-lingual approach to teaching foreign languages was popular among English teaching professionals, errors were seen as something to be avoided. However, today the contemporary research seems to agree on the fact that rather than expecting pupils to produce error-free sentences, pupils are encouraged to communicate in the target language and making errors is a natural part of second language acquisition.

1.2 Classification of errors

When it comes to classifying errors, the main concern is whether or not there is acceptable justification behind the choice of each category. Researchers believe that the classification criteria should reflect observable objective facts; that is, if similar error types are classified in the same taxonomy, the scheme should benefit learners in that they can attempt to generalize the nature and even the cause of the errors. This orientation reflects a pedagogical intention, because if a certain error taxonomy can be shown to consist of errors which are the result of the same cause, teachers will find it easier to provide feedback and remedial actions to reduce the errors.

Researchers proposed four major categories of errors for the purpose of classroom error correction:

1) Grammatical (morpho-syntactic) errors,

2) Discourse errors,

3) Phonologically-induced errors,

4) Lexical errors.

One can say that grammatical errors are the ‘local’ errors that are governed by a relatively fixed set of rules.

Discourse errors, on the other hand, are about breaches of appropriateness of the register or the social situation.

Phonologically-induced errors are errors in pronunciation and/or intonation, which shall receive no further attention in this study because only students’ written work is analyzed.

Lexical errors usually have to do with word choice and semantics, or the meaning intended by the utterance. This type of errors often arises in combination with other error categories, so it is sometimes not a straightforward matter to distinguish between a grammatical error and a lexical error.

Researchers also have proposed an error taxonomy consisting of two main categories: “structural errors” and “lexical errors”. Their taxonomy incorporates Kazakh-English interlanguage hypothesis and is intended as a partial classification scheme specific for errors in Kazakhstan. The “lexical error category” is subdivided into three more subcategories:

a) wrong collocation,

b) misspelling,

c) intransitive verbs used transitively.

The structural error category is subdivided into six subcategories:

1) pseudo-passive,

2) pseudo-tough movement,

3) existential pseudo-relative,

4) independent clause as subject,

5) faulty parallelism,

6) unnecessary topic-comment structure.

Such an error classification is believed to be maximally useful in terms of description of error types as well as giving advice on error correction.

The partial classification scheme mentioned above is especially relevant to the present study because it pays special attention to error types that are characteristic of learners. These ‘special’ errors arise due to language interference from Kazakh, which is the mother tongue of most students in Kazakhstan. When learners learn a foreign language, the linguistic system of the mother tongue often interacts with that of the target language, which is a psycholinguistic process. The term ‘interlanguage’ is used to describe a separate linguistic system of a foreign language , when he or she attempts to produce a target language norm, but fails. Corder(1981) prefers the term ‘interlanguage’ over ‘error’ because the term ‘error’ carries an obvious negative connotation of unacceptability and undesirability, whereas the term ‘interlanguage’ is more accurate in describing the true state of affairs in a learner’s language learning – that is, the idiosyncratic foreign language sentences produced by the learner actually bear a regularity to his or her mother tongue. On the surface these idiosyncratic sentences seem to be conspicuous errors attributable to the learner’s incompetence, but in fact the learner’s interlanguage has a system of its own which is as generalizable and predictable as both mother tongue and foreign language.

Clearly then, in order to create a suitable error classification scheme one needs to take into account the mother tongue of the group that is being studied, because learners with different mother tongue backgrounds are expected to produce different interlanguages. [5; 76]