1.3 Reasons why errors appear in speech

Language acquisition and language learning are the two ways of developing competence in a second language. They are closely interrelated and mutually supported. Language is best taught when it is being used to transmit messages, not when it is explicitly taught for conscious learning.

According to Larsen-Freeman there are different reasons why the study of language acquisition is important in learning and teaching process.

- Language acquisition is the source of insight into the teaching learning process.

- Language acquisition leads to greater teacher awareness of the acquisition process and sensitivity towards learners.

- Language learners who have studied language acquisition report that their awareness of language acquisition process facilitates their subsequent attempts at language learning.

- A high lightened understanding of language acquisition could also have impact on the other educational programs involving language acquisition, such as bilingual and multilanguage education, immersion programs.

According to Krashen's distinction between language acquisition and language learning, his suggestion that language is acquired through exposure to and interaction with comprehensible input, would constitute the so called an "external theory". [6]

A 'personal theory" is one which the teacher may have formulated through experience, and may not be conscious of. For example, a teacher who automatically corrects learners' mistakes of grammar might thus be subscribing to a 'personal theory" which holds that controlled correct language use facilitates learning. Thus, a principle related to an "external theory" would be that teachers should provide learners with comprehensible input, and one which related to the "personal theory" would be that mistakes of grammar should be corrected.

The researchers have used different types of analyses in an attempt to come to better understanding of the second language acquisition process. The study of language acquisition can be said to have passed through a series of phases such as, contrastive analysis, error analysis, performance analysis and discourse analysis.

- Contrastive analysis. The researchers conducted contrastive analyses comparing two languages They were motivated by the prospect of being able to identify points of similarity and difference between particular native language and target languages , believing that a more effective pedagogy would result when these were taken into consideration. And it's true, because everyone is familiar with interfering effects of the native language causing everything from accented speech to inappropriate non-verbal behaviour.

- In the meantime, the field of language teaching was dominated by the prevailing view of learning - that is of behaviorism. The behaviorists held that language acquisition was a product of habit formation. Habits were constructed through the repeated association between some stimulus and some response. Foreign language acquisition was viewed as a process of overcoming the habits of the native language in order to acquire the new habits of the target language. This was accomplished through the pedagogical practices of dialogue memorization, imitation and pattern practice. Thus, overlearning and automaticity was the goal.

- Error analysis. In the early 60s, inspired by Chomsky's theory of language acquisition, first language acquisition researchers began studying the speech of children acquiring English as a mother tongue. They tried to characterize their subjects' performance by writing a grammar - a system of rules which would account for the utterances the children produced. That was kept with Chomsky's view that language acquisition was not a product of habit formation, but rather one of a rule formation. Chomsky posited a theory in which humans were thought to possess a certain innate predisposition to induce the rules of the target language from the input to which they were exposed. Once acquired, these rules would allow learners to create and comprehend novel utterances, utterances they would neither have understood nor have produced were they limited to imitating input from the environment. [7; 57] Chomsky's theory of language acquisition received support from researchers recording the errors of children. Children acquiring English as their mother tongue were found to commit errors such as:

• she doesn't wants to go

• I eated it.

which suggested that they had internalized rules for subject-verb agreement and past tense formation in English, but had not yet mastered the limitations of the rules. Furthermore, such original errors indicated that the children were not simply repeating forms from the input they encountered. Especially, noteworthy for language acquisition was that learners were found to commit similar 'developmental' errors, errors that were not apparently due to mother tongue interference.

Thus, the process of language acquisition was also thought to be one of rule formation, in which the rules were inculcated through a process of hypothesis formation and testing. After the initial expose to the target language , learners form hypothesis about the nature of certain target language rules. They then test their hypotheses by applying them to produce target language utterances. Based on the mismatch learners perceive between what they are producing and the forms/functions of the target language to which they are being exposed, learners modify their hypotheses about the nature of the target language rules so that their utterances increasingly conform to the target language. [7; 57-58]

So in the process of language acquisition learners commit mistakes or errors, and it is the natural process. There is a distinction between a mistake and an error. Whereas mistake is a random performance slip caused by fatigue, excitement, etc., and therefore may be readily self-corrected, an error is a systematic deviation made by learners who have not yet mastered the rules of foreign language. A learner cannot self-correct an error because it is a product reflective of his or her current stage of foreign language development, or underlying competence. Rather than being seen as something to be prevented, then, errors were signs that learners were actively engaged in hypothesis testing which would ultimately result in the acquisition of target language rules.

Interlanguage. More of that the researchers found out that the language system that the learner constructs out of the linguistic input to which he has been exposed has been referred to as an interlanguage. The concept of interlanguage might be better understood if it is thought of as a continuum between the mother tongue and foreign language along which all learners traverse. At any point along the continuum, the learner's language is systematic, that is rule-governed, and common to all learners, any difference being explicable by differencies in their learning experience.

According to Selinker(1891), one of the major issues for which any description of interlanuage must account is the phenomenon of fossilization. "Fossilizable linguistic phenomena are linguistic items, rules and subsystems which speakers of a particular native language will tend to keep in their IL relative to a particular target language, no matter what the age of the learner or amount of explanation and instruction he receives in the target language." [7; 60]

There are different types of errors teachers should distinguish in the speech of their learners.

Learners commit errors which could be traced to native language interference and as such they were termed interlingual errors . However there was a large number of similar errors, committed by learners regardless to their mother tongue. These errors were called intralingual. In what was to become a seminal paper in the language acquisition field, maintained that learner's errors were invaluable to the study of language-learning process. By classifying the errors that learners made, Corder(1981) submitted, researchers could learn a great deal about the language acquisition process by inferring the strategies that learners were adopting. Such claims motivated a number of error taxonomies. Certain errors were classified as overgeneralization caused by the learners' failure to observe the boundaries of a rule, such as in the examples cited above. Other errors were attributed to simplification or redundancy reduction, such as when a plural marker was omitted from a noun. Still others were labeled communication-based errors which resulted when speakers invoked communicative strategies, and induced errors, errors which were brought about by a teacher's sequencing or presenting two linguistic items in a way which created confusion in the mind of a language learner. There is, of course, some overlap among these categories: a common simplification error, for example, such as the omission of be, could also be due to interference from a language with no such verbs.

We decided to examine the errors of Kazakh pupils in the process of their foreign language acquisition. We traced the following examples: (see Appendix 1)

There is the certain overlap in these mistakes. Some of them refer to both types of errors, for example, this film shooted as a fairy tale may be interlingual due to the interference of the mother tongue as well as communication based. It is not always true that a language learner, given a continued exposure to the target language, will steadily grow in his or her mastery of the interlanguage. Perhaps, it is the case, as Corder suggests, that once the language learner's interlanguage grammar is sufficiently developed to enable the learner to communicate adequately for his or her purposes, the motivation to improve wanes (becomes gradually less strong or less important)

It should be evident that the view of learners from an error analysis perspective differs vastly from the view of learners from the communicative approach perspective. In the latter, errors were the result of the intrusion of mother tongue habits over which the learner had no control. From an errors analysis perspective, the learner is no longer seen to be a passive recipient of target language input, but rather plays an active role, processing input, generating hypothesis, testing them and refining them, all the while determining the ultimate target language level he or she will attain. As Jacobovites put it for mother tongue acquisition; " The burden of acquisition is now placed on the child, with relative minor importance attached to the environment as a reinforcing agency". [6; 61]

Thus, we may conclude that the burden of acquisition is placed namely on the learner himself, but importance should be given to the different types of techniques which can be applied in improving and polishing his foreign language.

Why do students make mistakes?

There are the following reasons:

Mistakes are due to:

A. false friend

В. Interlanguage

C.native language interference

D.overgeneralisation

E.fossilisation

F.developmental error

False friend: A word in the target language which looks or sounds as if it has the same meaning as a similar word in the learners' first language but does not, e.g. in French 'librairie' is a place where people can buy books. In a library in English, you do not buy books but borrow them instead.

Interlanguage: The learners own version of the second language which they speak as they learn. They create their own grammatical system as they are learning, which is neither their first language nor the target language but something in between the two. This version of their language changes as they progress and learn more.

Native language interference: When the learner's mother tongue affects their performance in the target language. A learner may make a mistake because they use the same grammatical pattern in the target language as they use in their mother tongue. The mother tongue grammatical pattern is not appropriate in the target language.

Overgeneralisation: When a student uses a grammatical rule he/she has learned, but uses it in situations when it is not needed or appropriate, e.g. a student says There were three girls (correct plural form used for most nouns) and two mans, (incorrect plural form - not appropriate for man).

Fossilisation: The process in which incorrect language becomes a habit and cannot easily be corrected.

Developmental error: An error made by a second language learner which is natural part of the language learning process because they are unconsciously organising and working out language These types of error are also made by children learning their first language and often disappear as their language ability improves. [8; 38-39]

Thus, English Language teaching has seen a show in focus from teaching individual components such as reading, writing, speaking, and grammar toward teaching these components integratively as they are being used in daily communication. This change in methodological approach subsequently affects the way teachers perceive learners' errors in writing. Teachers no longer view errors only as those which affect discreet grammatical, lexical, or structural items, but also as errors, that affect the discourse of a written text. In other words, teachers today are also concerned about a particular piece of writing communicating effectively and meaningfully by means of its coherence and its conforming to the expectations of its prospective readers.

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.

Errors can also be classified as “pro­ductive” and “receptive”.

“Global” and “Local”.

Er­rors also fall into four main categories: omis­sion of some required element; addition of some unnecessary or incorrect ele­ment; selection of an incorrect element; and misordering of elements.

This Chapter presents the following reasons why do pupils make mistakes. They are the following: false friend, interlanguage, native language, interference, overgeneralization, fossilization, developmental error.

Chapter 2 Ways of error’s correction in the speech of learners

It was found that the errors made by the subjects were caused by two main factors: interference from mother tongue and language learning problems. This is because pupils find more difficulty in learning English patterns that are similar to, but in some way different from patterns of their own language than they do with learning patterns that are completely different.

The largest proportion of errors attributable to learning problems was made in the selection of an alternative, incorrect preposition. When teachers fully understand an error, they are still faced with the problem of clearly presenting the correction, along with any necessary explanation. Again, this must be done in the context of continuing activities, so other factors will also make their claim on the teacher's attention. And, once again, the correction will often have to be designed to fit the reason for its occurrence. For a given error there may be a variety of possible causes and a variety of possible repairs; choosing one that is appropriate is not an easy task.

In presenting a correction, teachers must also be concerned with what the student can and cannot understand. Students have limited knowledge of grammar, so even when the teacher fully understands an error and presents what would seem to be a clear correction, the correction may fail because the pupil does not understand it. Even when the student does understand, this understanding may not extend beyond the particular context in which the correction occurred. The complexity of grammar often makes such generalization difficult. Presenting corrections in a way that overcomes these problems is challenging, to say the least.

The teacher must also deal with the question of whom the correction is aimed at. One pupil made the error, but others will hear the correction. A correction designed for one particular pupil may be quite inappropriate for the others. On the other hand, a correction designed to benefit the group as a whole may not be appropriate for the pupil who actually made the mistake. [10; 182-183]