Error Analysis (Second-Language Acquisition)

In linguistics, error analysis studies the mistakes learners make when using a word, a speech act or a grammatical form in a way that appears imperfect and signals incomplete learning. It treats an error as a systematic deviation that occurs when a learner has not yet mastered some feature of the language and consistently gets it wrong, understood in the context of language learning or second-language acquisition. Errors are read as signals that real learning is taking place, showing that a learner has not yet developed a fully structured competence in the target language. To a teacher, a learner's errors show how far they have progressed toward a goal and what remains to be learned; to a researcher, they provide evidence of how language is being acquired and what strategies a learner is using; and to learners themselves, making errors can be one of the devices by which they learn. Two schools of thought have divided the field: one ties error-making to the adequacy of the teaching method itself, on the view that better teaching would prevent the errors, while the other treats error and error correction as an unavoidable part of language learning regardless of the teaching approach used.