Learning through Errors IV

Once Korean learners’ English errors are identified, the next step is to describe them adequately. Surface strategy taxonomy is one of the bases for the descriptive classification of errors. Recent researchers show that a language learner possesses a specific type of innate mental organization which causes him to use a limited class of processing strategies to produce utterances in a language. Analyzing Korean learners’ English errors from a surface strategy taxonomy leads them to realize that their errors are based on some logic.

The recent focus of error analysis is to formulate those principles that generate interlanguage sentences. Korean learners work on interim principles to produce English utterances and make specific English errors that can be described as errors of addition, omission, misformation, and misordering.

Heidi Dulay characterizes omission errors as the “absence of an item that must appear in a well-formed utterance.” They are found in great abundance and across a variety of grammatical morphemes during the early stages of second language acquisition. Most omissions are intralingual errors explained in a developmental perspective, though a few are due to interference. Korean learners’ omission of the English indefinite article can be regarded as due to interference because the Korean language does not especially require an article before the names of objects. But Korean learners’ omissions of grammatical morphemes, such as noun and verb inflections, articles, verb auxiliaries, and prepositions, are developmental errors. The errors are widespread in many international situations. Korean learners’ omission of the English auxiliary do does not show interference from the Korean language because the language has nothing in its interrogative or negative formations which correspond to the obligatory use of the English auxiliary: “How many you think?” “She no look at it.” Learners of English as a second language tend not to develop the uses of tense, aspect or the modal system in the early stages of learning. 

Addition errors are the opposite of omissions. Those errors usually occur in the later stages of second language acquisition when the learner has acquired some target language rules but has not yet refined them. Two types of addition errors have been observed in the speech of both first language and second language learners: double markings and regularizations. Double markings are described as the failure to delete certain items which are required in some linguistic constructions but not in others. Korean learners sometimes mark two items rather than one for the same feature, as when they make double marking errors commonly observed in second language performance: “She didn’t went.” “That is the man who I saw him.” On the other hand, regulation errors that fall under the addition category are those in which a marker that is typically added to a linguistic item is erroneously added to exceptional items of the given class that do not take a marker, as in “sheeps” or “beated.” One Korean learner regularized some English rules because of intralingual transfer between items in English, as she wrote “He explained to his brother about the battle that how they were attacked.” Verb “explained” seems to attract “about” probably because it is closer in meaning to verbs which take “about,” such as “say about something,” “speak about,” and “write about something.” With the addition of the preposition, the regularization of “that” as a noun clause marker in addition to “how” led the learner to produce the utterance above.