Doreen Albrecht Anja Flade

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Doreen AlbrechtAnja Flade

• Common Learner Errors
• TU Chemnitz
• Academic English in Theory and Practice
• Lecturer M. Weißer
• SS 07 - 02.07.2007

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• Introduction

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- most persistent problem students inability
to express themselves adequately in spoken
language - most needed skill at university
listening comprehension vs. understanding native
speakers, biggest problem for 70 of the
students after their arrival in the UK
?influences participation in seminars (and the
reception of teaching methods)
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Academic writing predominant problems
- students vocabulary, style, spelling,
grammar - staff style, grammar, vocabulary -
linguistic unaware tutors poorly understood
vs. badly expressed - unintentional plagiarism
through lack of awareness - cultural
differences in the degrees of directness and
concession permitted
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Defining errors
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Classification of deviance
- Slips or Lapses can be quickly detected and
unaided self-corrected - Mistakes can only be
corrected by their agent if their deviance is
pointed out (first-order mistakes sufficient
self-correction, second-order mistakes
additional information is needed) - Errors cant
be self-corrected until further relevant input
has been given and converted by the learner -
Solecism breaches of the rules of correctness
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Measures of deviance
Grammaticality - ungrammaticality is context
free - problem different grammars will register
different decisions concerning borderline
cases - indicator of grammatical unacceptability
is corrigibility - native speaker decides
whether an utterance is grammatical or not
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Acceptability - is determined by the use or
usability - user decides whether it is
acceptable or not - tests of establishing
acceptability use and unproblematicity -
refers to the context (situational linguistic)
tries to contextualize the utterance
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? sources of unacceptability-
ungrammaticality - failure to fit the intended
context Pele wore a green dress and made three
goals. - unusual, bizarre nature of the idea
expressed or reference to an inconceivable
situation My lawnmower thinks I dont like
it. - an unusual way of referring to an
nonetheless conceivable situation Be
underneath Cyril. - flouting customary
collocations The white and black cat grinned.
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- producing unlogical grammar or phonological
configurations He was finishing doing
computing approaching retiring. - producing
hard-to-process syntactic or phonological
complexity The flea the rat the cat the dog
chased killed carried bit me. - upsetting the
balance of sentence parts Eat the porridge
your sister has carefully for you cook up. -
breaking rules that are not natural rules but
made by purists Just try to always say
thank you.
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Correctness - recourse to prescriptive
normative standards - metalinguistic decision ?
reflection about explicitly learnt canons
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Description of errors
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Error detection becoming aware of its
presence - yes/ no decision
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Locating errors - pointing out errors
straightforward (words, grammar or the like) -
global errors diffused throughout the sentence
or a larger unit of the text that contains
them ?erroneous sentence
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Describing errors - procedure reveals which
errors are the same and which are different -
purpose of description - make explicit what
otherwise would be tacit and on the level of
intuition - prerequisite for counting errors -
create categories
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Categories of errors
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Omission - typical for untutored learners or
learners in early stages - tends to affect
function words rather than content words -
ungrammatical, needs to be distinguished from
ellipsis and from zero elements - leads to a
truncated sense
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Addition - result of all-too-faithful use of
certain rules - subtypes ? regularization
overlooking exceptions and spreading rules to
domains where they do not apply ?
irregularization occurs when a productive
process is not applied (e.g. the form is wrongly
assumed to be an exception of the general rule)
? double marking failure to delete certain
items which are required in some linguistic
constructions but not in others
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Misformation - use of the wrong form of a
structure or a morpheme - subtypes ?
misselection/ archiform out of the members of
a class of forms only one member is chosen to
represent all ?overrepresented/ underrepresented
(e.g. this/ that/ these- that) ?
regularization ? alternating forms free
alternation of various members of a class with
each other
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Misordering - arrange structures or words in
the right order - syntactic or rhetorical
ordering- often the result of word for word
translations - subtype ? misplacement -
failing to conform to cultural conventions
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Blends - aka contamination,
cross-assossication or hybridization error - two
grammatical forms are combined to produce an
ungrammatical blend - forms ? deletion
total mutual inhibition of each potential
target ? addition/ overinclusion conflict of
choice is not resolved ? part of each target
is inhibited and a part is used
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Counting errors
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- markedness relatively infrequent, more complex
structures tend to be replaced by structures that
are more frequent, less complex and have fewer
restrictions - error gravity snowballing
effect one erroneous form is the cause for a
whole series of contingent errors to surface
(e.g. It was all told me about I was told all
about it.)? concomitant errors ? performance
mistakes - problem counting types or tokens? ?
solution lexical replica are not counted as long
as they do not have distinct targets (e.g.
lucky- happy vs. ugly)
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Levels of error
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- classification by modality, medium and
level - modality receptive vs. productive -
medium spoken vs. written - m m listening,
reading, writing or speaking? - 3 levels of
language substance (medium) text
(usage) discourse (use)
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? level - phonological or
graphological substance (spelling,
pronouncing) encoding/ decoding error
e.g. punctuation errors - most
frequent errors overuse of exclamation marks and
commas, underuse of apostrophes, under- or
overuse of capitals, splits (to gether) or
fusions (takeaway) confusibles
speaker knows two words that sound similar but
failes to differentiate between them (consonant/
consonant, chords/ cords)
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? producing text with the
lexico-grammatial system of the target language
composing/ understanding errors e.g.
false friends When will I
become a steak? I hope never, but youll get
it soon. misformations
production of non-existing words in the foreign
language sleep suit instead of
pyjama
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? discourse level misformulation,
misprocessing (extratextual knowledge brought to
the text) e.g.
misprocessing He outgrew her ? They
grew together (student knows grow,
thought it means mutual growth ?
opposite meaning!)
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Diagnosing errors
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- distinguish between description and
diagnosis - 4 main diagnosis-based categories of
error interlingual intralingual communication
-strategy induced
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? interlingual errors mother-tongue
influence - in Hungarian nouns do not
pluralize after a numeral ? five horse instead
of five horses
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? intralingual errors target language
causes false analogy learner assumes that the
new item B behaves like the known item A ? boy/
boys, child/ childs misanalysis They are
carnivorous plants and its (their) name comes
from ? false hypothesis its is the pluralized
form of it
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? communication strategy-based errors - using a
synonym (credibility for truth) - a
subordinate term (fruits for apples) - an
antonym or opposite (not happy for sad) - to
coin a word (sensities for senses)
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? induced errors - learner errors that result
more from the classroom situation than from the
students incompetence teacher introduces to
worship as a synonym for to pray but misses
to to separate one from the other ? learners
assumption worshipping to God
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Common learner errors (German mother tongue)
http//www.business-english-training.com/mistake.h
tml
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5. Being an abstract concept 'information' is
an uncountable noun. Hence the oft-heard words
'I need three informations' are NOT correct. You
should say 'I need some information' or 'I need
three bits (or pieces) of information'.
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11 Be careful when using the word
'eventually'. If you say something will
'eventually happen' you mean that it is certain
to happen but that it will happen sometime a long
way off in the future. It does not express
possibility or uncertainty about an event
happening!
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19 The abbreviation i.e., means 'that is' and
comes from the Latin 'id est'. It does NOT mean
'in example'!
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34 I hear lots of non-native clients /
learners say 'it is self-evident that....' It
is more idiomatic to say 'it stands to reason
that....' or 'it goes without saying that....'
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36 The break in a theatre play or in a cinema
performance is called an interval - or
occasionally an intermission, at school, in a
meeting, workshop etc we call the gap between
lessons or sessions a break, e.g. coffee break. A
pause is only a break in a conversation.
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60 The verb 'to discuss' means to talk about.
Hence it is tautologous to say 'to discuss
about'. This is like saying 'to talk about
about'!
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62 In English you give a presentation, a
speech or a talk. You don't 'hold' one. And the
verb is 'to present' not 'to presentate' (sic.)

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73 When talking about your studies you can use
the verb 'to graduate', which means to
successfully complete a course of study. For
example, I graduated from Oxford in 1975. And
while we are on the subject the academic
qualification (and piece of paper) you are
awarded is usually known as a degree rather than
a diploma. The latter tends to be used for
vocational or practical courses.
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80 In English you are good / bad AT (doing)
something not 'good / bad in something'. For
example, he is good at French, he is bad at
football.
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113 In English you should not put a comma
before the word 'that'. The following sentence
is INCORRECT 'He said, that he had enjoyed his
stay in Leeds very much' (sic).
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119 Please note that the word 'engineer' is a
job description in English and not an academic
title. I have had German clients who - to me -
are quite obviously telecommunications engineers
insisting that they are not engineers because
they haven't got a university degree and don't
have the prefix Dipl.-Ing. before their name.
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128 In English you comment ON something. It is
incorrect to say 'to comment something'.
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Sources
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James, Carl Errors in language learning and use
1998, Longman, London, 1. publ.
Hyland, Ken English for academic purposes 2006,
Routledge, London, 1. publ.
http//www.business-english-training.com/mistake.h
tml