“The Significance of Learner's Errors”

“The Significance of Learner's Errors”

1. It is true that the application of linguistic and psychological theory to the study of language learning added a new dimension to the discussion of errors; people now believed they had a principled means for accounting for these errors, namely that they were the result of interference in the learning of a second language from the habits of the first language

2. They noted for example that many of the errors with which they were familiär were not predicted by the linguist anyway. The teacher has been on the whole, therefore, more concerned with how to deal with these areas of difficulty than with the simple identification of them, and here has reasonably feit that the linguist has had little to say to him

3. The learning of the mother-tongue is part of the whole maturational process of the child, whilst learning a second language normally begins only after the maturational process is largely complete; that the infant Starts with no overt language behaviour, while in the case pf the second language learner such behaviour, of course, exists; that the motivation for learning a first language is quite different from that for learning a second language.

4. The child who fails for any reason i. e. deafness, to acquire a primary language before the age of 12 thereafter rapidly loses the capacity to acquire language behaviour at all. This finding does not of course carry with it the implication that the language learning capacity of those who havesuccessfullylearned a primary language also atrophies in the same way

5. Given motivation, itis inevitable that a human being will learn a second language if he is exposed to the language data. Study of language aptitude does in some measure support such a view since motivation and intelligence appear to be the two principal factors which correlate significanüy with achievement in a second language.