Omar Brito

1. Recognition of Errors

To recognize an error one should first of all know what is meant by the term ‘error’. Pit Corder uses the term “Erroneous” to mean those utterances(expresiones) which are either(ya sea) superficially deviant/desviado or inappropriate in terms of the target language grammar. He distinguishes between mistakes, lapses and errors. They correspond to what he calls Pre-systematic, Post-systematic and Systematic errors.

i. Pre-systematic errors are those committed/comprometido by the learners while he or she is trying to come to grips/ajustarse with a new point

ii. Post-systematic errors occur when one temporarily forgets a

iii. point that has been previously understood

Systematic errors are those which occur when the learner has formed inaccurate/innapropiado hypothesis about the target language (i.e. the language that he is learning).

Even native speakers utterances are full of slips of the tongue and lapses. These are supposed to increase under conditions of stress, indecision and fatigue. If this is the case with native speakers second language learners are sure to encounter these problems perhaps/tal vez to a greater degree. In such cases the teacher may not always be able to distinguish such lapses from errors.

As Pit Corder points out, “Recognition of error is thus crucially dependent upon correct interpretation of the learners’ intentions”. He talks about two types of utterances:

The two types of utterances mentioned by Pit Corder are as follows:

**They can be classified by how apparent they are: overt errors such as "I angry" are obvious even out of context, whereas covert errors are evident only in context.

(1) Overtly erroneous -Superficially deviant

(2) Covertly erroneous - Superficially well formed but not meaning what the learner intended to mean

To arrive at a knowledge of what the learner intended to say one can ask the learner to explain in his mother tongue what he wanted to say. An interpretation based on this is called ‘authoritative interpretation’. Then the utterances are reconstructed keeping in mind what the native speaker would have said to convey that message in that context. This is called an ‘authoritative reconstruction’.

In cases where one does not have access to the learner what is called a ‘plausible interpretation’ and a ‘plausible reconstruction’ could be made. This is done by studying the surface structure of the text-sentence in conjunction with the information derived from its context. Then the utterances are reconstructed to convey what the learner could possibly have intended to mean. To identify errors the original utterances are compared with their plausible or authoritative reconstructions. Once the recognition has taken place description could begin.

2. Description of Errors

In this step one tries to show the learners how they have failed to realize the intended message. There are problems which prevent proper description as the researcher needs an extremely good insight into the learner’s mind. Mc. Donough (1981) remarks that it should not be supposed that all learners take the same route to the same error “Nor should it be assumed that one learner may not at different times produce the same error for different reasons”.

But Pit Corder feels this is irrelevant for “ our object in error analysis is to explain errors linguistically and psychologically in order to help the learner to learn”. He suggests that we should look for errors that occur repeatedly so that we can observe the rule that the learner may be using and try to describe it.

This way only systematic errors are taken into consideration. This is a difficult task because individual learners may be highly inconsistent in their errors. Corder agrees that inconsistency is more characteristic of errors than

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