5

Where do errors come from?

According to a website for EFL teachers, the following errors are supposedly typical of English
language learners who share a common first language (L1). Do you know what that language
is?

I’ll wait my friend.

I went to home last night.

I asked to him to help me.

We really enjoyed.

I went to the store for buying some food.

You are forgiven if you find the task difficult. While the language in question is Turkish, these
would all seem to be errors that any number of different English learners might make, whether
their first language was Spanish, Arabic, or Japanese. That is to say, the errors are not
necessarily an effect of transfer from Turkish. So, where do these errors come from?

There are at least three possible sources. It might be that indeed the errors are caused by
transfer from the L1, and this is because these languages all share (with Turkish) grammatical
features that English does not have. Alternatively, they may be a surface manifestation of the
deep structure of a universal grammar, as posited by Chomskyan linguistics. Or maybe they
derive from some inherent cognitive processes of simplification, over-generalization,
redundancy, etc., and are indicators of the way the human mind adapts to the demands of a
new and complex linguistic ‘ecology’.
The transfer hypothesis is, for many people, the ‘default’ theory. ‘It’s self-evident,’ wrote an MA
student of mine recently, ‘that most learner errors are caused by mother tongue interference’.
Is it really self-evident? It was certainly self-evident in the mid-twentieth century, as
encapsulated in this statement by Lado (1957: 58-9): ‘We know from the observation of many
cases that the grammatical structure of the native language tends to be transferred to the
foreign language ... We have here the major source of difficulty or ease in learning a foreign
language ... Those structures that are different will be difficult.’

More recently, it has been shown that it is not difference, but similarity, that causes the
problem. According to Swan and Smith (2001: xi), the more similar two languages are (as in
the case of English and French, for example), the more likely the learner will be tempted to
transfer from one to the other, while ‘speakers of unrelated languages such as Chinese or
Arabic have fewer problems with transfer, and correspondingly more which arise from the
intrinsic difficulty of the English structures themselves.’

However, the fact that – as I argued above – many errors seem to be universally shared,
whether or not the L1 is similar to English or not, suggested to researchers in the 1980s that
errors may have a developmental origin. Developmental errors, according to Dulay et al. (1982:
165) ‘are errors similar to those made by children learning the target language as their first
language’. They then claim that ‘all the investigations conducted to date have reached the same
general conclusion: the majority of errors made by second language learners are not
interlingual, but developmental’ (ibid.: 173).

In fact, the developmental view had been argued much earlier than the 1980s. In a book called
Common Errors in English: Their Cause, Prevention and Cure, F.G. French (1949: 6) states
his case thus:

The argument here presented is that if errors are due … to cross-association, then the Japanese
form of error should be one thing and the Bantu form quite another ... But that is not the case. ...
The collection of ‘common errors’ … proves that the errors which exasperate teachers of English
are indeed ‘common’.
French adds (ibid.: 7): ‘In seeking the source of error in the vernacular [i.e. the L1], the teacher
is searching in the wrong field. The fact that the errors are common indicates that they have a
common cause.’

Nowadays, as ever, the pendulum has started to swing back to a more balanced view, where
multiple causes of error are acknowledged. Lightbown and Spada (2006: 187), for example,
accept that ‘the transfer of patterns from the native language is one of the major sources of
errors in learner language’, but they qualify this position by adding that there are also errors
that learners from different language backgrounds not only share but are surprisingly similar to
the kinds of errors made by first language learners:
In such cases, second language errors are evidence of the learners’ efforts to discover the
structure of the target language itself rather than attempts to transfer patterns from the first
language.

More recently, scholars have used computers to model how the brain’s neural networks
behave. These show that, when the condition of child bilingualism is modelled (where two
languages are being acquired more or less simultaneously), the network is able to separate out
the vocabularies of each language quite comfortably. However, where a second language is
overlaid on top of an existing one, there is much less separation. It’s as if the first language
‘blocks’ or ‘overshadows’ the independent establishment of the second. Nick Ellis (2006: 185)
sums up the findings: ‘Adult second language simulations show relatively little L1–L2 separation
at a local level and maximal transfer and interference.’ This tends to confirm the view that, as
one writer put it, ‘second language is looking into the windows cut out by the first language’
(Ushakova 1994: 154).

Of course, any discussion of error assumes that there is a ‘gold standard’ by which errors can
be judged, an error being any deviation from the standard. But what is that standard? Even
ignoring the diversity of English varieties in the world, is it fair to judge a learner’s interlanguage
by the standards of a native speaker? After all, as Larsen-Freeman and Cameron (2008: 141)
point out, if we view language as a complex dynamic system, there is no ‘final state’, and hence
there will never be complete convergence between the learner’s L2 and a notional target
language. The two systems run on different tracks.

Maybe it is time to banish the term ‘error’ – with its negative connotations – once and for all,
and talk instead of ‘interlanguage forms’.

Questions for discussion

1. Can you think of some errors that are very clearly those of a particular language group? Are
the errors mainly grammatical or lexical?

2. Why do you think it’s self-evident that errors are caused by L1 interference?

3. Errors may be caused by ‘processes of simplification, over-generalization, redundancy’. Can

you think of examples of errors in any of these categories?
4. In your own experience, either as a teacher or a learner, do you feel that, the closer two
languages are, the more likely there will be interference? Or the opposite?

5. Most of the discussion has been about grammar errors. In the case of vocabulary or
pronunciation, is there a stronger or weaker case for the influence of the L1?

6. ‘Second language is looking into the windows cut out by the first language.’ What exactly
does this mean, and do you think it is true? Can you ever ‘escape’ your first language?

7. Given the spread of English as an International Language (EIL), is it fair to say that there is
no longer a ‘gold standard’ for English? If so, how should teachers treat error?

8. What are the implications, do you think, of substituting ‘interlanguage form’ for the term
‘error’? Would this be a good idea?

References
Dulay, H., Burt, M. and Krashen, S. (1982) Language Two, New York, Oxford University Press.

Ellis, N. (2006) ‘Selective attention and transfer phenomena in L2 acquisition: contingency, cue
competition, salience, interference, overshadowing, blocking, and perceptual learning’, Applied
Linguistics, 27, 2, 164.

French, F.G. (1949) Common Errors in English: Their Cause, Prevention and Cure, London:
Oxford University Press.

Lado, R. (1957) Linguistics across Cultures, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Larsen-Freeman, D. and Cameron, L. (2008) Complex Systems and Applied Linguistics,

Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Lightbown, P. and Spada, N. (2006) How Languages are Learned (3rd ed.), Oxford: Oxford
University Press.

Swan, M. and Smith, B. (eds) (2001) Learner English: A Teacher’s Guide to Interference and
Other Problems (2nd ed.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Ushakova, T.N. (1994) ‘Inner speech and second language acquisition: an experimental-
theoretical approach’, in Lantolf, J.P. and Appel, G. (eds) Vygotskian Approaches to Second
Language Research, Norwood, NJ: Ablex.
To see how readers responded to this topic online, go to

http://scottthornbury.wordpress.com/2010/05/09/e-is-for-error/