The analysis of the written and spoken errors of senior

students of English translation of university of Zabol

P.Heydari, BA student of English translation of university of Zabol

Email:[email protected]

Abstract
Error creation in learning a language is a natural phenomenon. The mistakes of
students are clear evidence of the different techniques they use in the learning process
of the target language and they play a significant role in the study of second and foreign
language acquisition.

The present study conducted on English translation senior students of Zabol university
with the aim of examine the common spoken and written errors which they make in their
speaking and writing. The study represents 24 types of errors that I dealt with after
seven semesters at Zabol university. Furthermore, the type of errors with their sources
is represented by the study. This study has pointed out that interlingual transfer and
intralingulal transfer are the sources of errors.

key words: interlingual transfer, mother tongue, pronunciation error, error analysis
Introduction
Speaking and writing in English for a second or foreign language learner is more difficult
than using in a native language. Usually the talking occurs in real situation and
naturally. This requires students directly to make utterances in the target language. This
paper focuses on some errors provided by elementary and intermediate English
translation senior students of Zabol university. So 24 types of errors which I dealt in
speaking and writing are mentioned in this research. The main purpose of the
research is for students to learn from these errors in order to become a more competent
and confident speaker and writer. Students learning English as a second language can
make errors along the way so It is unavoidable. Other learners or Students of English
classes of University of Zabol may make same errors.
Students who speak more English are less likely to make mistakes. Although the
students are on high semester, but they don’t master the rule of English, they will make
many errors in their speaking.
Although the students are on high semester, but they don't master English rule, they will
make a lot of mistakes in their speech.

Students should know what kind of errors are involved. With the understanding errors
knowledge, students can minimize making mistakes and improve their ability to
communicate. So, particularly in the skills, the students can master the English

The errors can be classified into the following categories: 1. Orthographical error

2. morphological3. morpho-syntactic 4. lexico-semantic.

It is good to discuss the main reasons of errors. According to Clark and clark
(1977:271), there are three sources of speech error, as follow:

a. Cognitive reason

“People usually take longer time to produce sentences which deal with abstract things
than concrete ones”.

b. Psychological or affective reason

“When people are anxious they become tense, and their planning and execution of
speech becomes less efficient”.

c. Social reason

“Speech plan seems difficult when conversation takes place under pressure”.
In order to clearing the matter, I shared a few errors in the following examples:

1.(some nouns occur only in the singular form)

Incorrect: There is much dusts. There is more courages. He had less funs
Correct: There is much dust. There is more courage. He had less fun.
2.That/who

Incorrect: I have written to my sister that lives in France.

Correct: I have written to my sister who lives in France.
I found 24 errors’ types during the discussion in the English translation classrooms of
Zabol university or during the student’s presentation or lecture. I dealt with some of
these errors in their writing when I was in the academic writing classrooms. A few errors
occurred during their speaking when I was in the dormitory and they were discussing
about their future plans about studying lessons for final exams. Many of these errors
were evident in the Oral reproduction stories classrooms when they were narrating
stories. Another situation was at self-service at lunch time when we discussed about
lessons or the quality and kind of food. It was similar to the conversation below:
Incorrect
A: Do you like to eat lunch with us today?
B: Yeah sure, where do you go?

Correct:
A: Would you like to eat lunch with us today?
B: Yeah sure where are you going?
After all of these explanation there is a question:
Which types of errors are most likely to occur?

Hypothesis: I think most of them are lexical. but it needs to see all of errors provided in
this paper.

Limitation: 1. It is time consuming to understand common types of errors students

made in speaking and writing
2.Only 2 or 3 teachers informed us about these errors and others didn’t help me to
provide these list of errors
Review of Literature
Error Analysis is one of the major topics in the field of second language acquisition
research. Errors are an integral part of language learning. The learner of English as a
second language is unaware of the existence of the particular system or rule in English
language. The learner’s errors have long been interested for second and foreign
language researchers. The basic task of error analysis is to describe how learning
occurs by examining the learner’s output and this includes his/her correct and incorrect
utterances. There are two major approaches to the study of learner’s errors, namely
contrastive analysis and error analysis. Error analysis cannot be studied properly
without touching upon the notion of contrastive analysis. Contrastive analysis and error
analysis have been commonly recognized as branches of Applied Linguistic Science.
This paper examines in detail the three most influential error theories: Contrastive
analysis, Error analysis and Interlanguage theory. Corder (1978) maintains that
interlanguage can be seen as a restructuring or a recreating continuum and, therefore;
evaluates their role in second language acquisition (khansir, 2012).

Corder (1978) proposes five steps in error analysis research. These steps are:

1. Collection of a sample of learner language

2. Identification of errors

3. Description of errors

4. Explanation of errors

5. Evaluation of errors.

Keshavarz (1999) mentioned that Error Analysis is a procedure used by both

researchers and teachers which involves collecting samples of learner language,
identifying the errors in the sample, describing these errors, classifying them according
to their nature and causes, and evaluating their seriousness.

on the basis of the foregoing discussion it can be concluded that error analysis is based
on three important assumptions, as follows (Keshavrz,2016):

1.Errors are inevitable as we cannot learn a language, be it first or second, without

committing errors

2.Errors are significant in different ways

3.Not all errors are attributable to the learners ‘mother tongue, i.e., first language
interference is only one of the sources of errors.
Errors are sometimes confused with mistakes. Therefore, it seems necessary to draw a
distinction between errors and mistakes.

Errors have been defined as deviations from the norms of the TL. In other words, they
occur systematically as a result of the learner's incomplete knowledge of the rules of the
target language.

According to Ellis (2003) errors reflect gaps in a learner's knowledge; the occur because
the learner does not know what is correct.

In contrast to errors, mistakes, or performance errors, are random deviations and do not
reflect a defect in the linguistic system(Keshavarz,2016)

Mistakes reflect occasional lapses in performance(Ellis,2003).

Corder (1974:24) states "errors of performance (mistakes) will be characteristically

unsystematic and errors of competence, systematic"
In linguistics, according to J. Richard et al., (2002), an error is the use of a word, speech
act or grammatical items in such a way it seems imperfect and significant of an
incomplete learning

Hendrickson (1987:357) mentioned that errors are ‘signals’ that indicate an actual
learning process taking place and that the learner has not yet mastered or shown a
well-structured competence in the target language

According to Corder (1976) errors are significant of three things, first to the teacher, in
that they tell him, if he or she undertakes a systematic analysis, how far towards that
goal the learner has progressed and, consequently, what remains for him to learn.
Second, they provide the researcher with evidence of how language is learned or
acquired, and what strategies or procedures the learner is employing in his discovery of
the language. Third (and in a sense this is their most important aspect) they are
indispensable to the learner himself, because we can regard the making of errors as a
device the learner uses in order to learn (p. 167). The occurrence of errors is merely
signs of ‘’the present inadequacy of our teaching methods’’ (Corder 1976, p. 163).

According to Dulay et al. (1982) errors take place when the learner changes the
surface structure in a particularly systematic manner (p. 150), thus, the error, no matter
what form and type it is, represent a damage at the level of the target language
production.

Errors have been classified by J. Richard et al. (2002) into two categories. The
Interlingual Error and the Intralingual Error, those two elements refer respectively to the
negative influence of both the speaker’s native language, and the target language itself.
Developmental or intralingual errors have similarities to those errors committed by
children learning the target language as their first language (Dulay et al, 1982, p.165)

Studying any deviation helps the instructor to create remedial action in the process of
errors correction (Corder 1981).

Discussion
The study is about the possible errors of senior students of English translation at
university of Zabol. I provided a list of 24 types of errors from different sources. I tried to
collect different compositions written and spoken by senior elementary and intermediate
students of English translation of Zabol university, underlined the errors and
reconstructed the erroneous utterances. Most of the errors were made because of the
fact that most of the students produced a statement after trying hard to find an
equivalent in their mother tongue. Before explaining any of these errors I attempted to
provide definition of types and sources of the errors.

1.Orthographic Errors

A large number of orthographic(spelling) errors are caused by the inconsistencies of

English spelling system. In the majority of cases, there is no correspondence between
letters of alphabet and the sounds they represent. (Keshavarz,2016)

2.Phonological Error

Five major types of phonological errors(Keshavarz,2016):

1.Lack of certain TL phonemes in the learner’s NL./ θ/

2.Differences in syllable structures of L1 & L2No initial consonant cluster in Persian

but exist in English such as Sky, Street

3.Spelling pronunciation of wordsgesture /ˈgestʃər/ instead of /ˈdʒestʃə(r)/

4.The problem of silent lettersThey tend to pronounce honest as/hanest/

5.Suprasegmental errorsStress and intonation

3.Lexical Errors

According to Keshavarz (2016) lexical Errors refers to errors related to the semantic
properties of lexical items. As Wells (2013) notes, lexical errors are restricted to content
words and not function words as prepositions and articles.

4.Morphological errors
 are errors formed or made when the morphological aspect of grammar is being
tainted, or misinformed. Such as wrong use of plural morpheme

*NO body likes extra works(Keshavarz,2016)

Omission of morphemes and preposition.

*If we learn English well we can teach it ∅ to others. (Keshavarz,2016)

Sources of errors

1.Interlingual transfer: transfer from the mother tongue or any other previously learned
language.

2.Interalingual transfer: Errors that result from L2 itself

3.Transfer training

After these definitions of types and sources of errors, there are 24 examples of errors
that students made in their speaking and writing in the following tables:
Table1

NO. EU1 RS2 Type Source

One of the bitterest memories that One of the bitterest omission, Intralingualtransfer
1 always stick in my mind… memories that always syntactic-morphological
sticks in my mind

2/3 … is the picture of _accident in the … is the image of an (selection, (interlingualtransfer)-

road accident in the road lexico-semantic)-(selection,
syntactic- morphological) (intralingual transfer)

4/5/6 (selection, lexico-semantic) (intralingualtransfer)-

At the middle of summer_ decided In the middle of -(omission, syntactic- (interlingual

to go to north summer we decided to morphological)-(addition, transfer)-(interlingual
go north. syntactic-morphological transfer)

1
EU=Erroneous Utterance
2
RS=Reconstructed Sentence
NO. EU RS Type Source

7 (interlingual transfer)-

/8 In road when_ arrive to In road when we arrived at (omission, lexico-semantic)- (intralingual transfer)-
khoshaylagh neck Khoshaylagh Neck
/9 (selection, syntactic-morphological) (interlingual transfer)-

/10. -(selection, (transfer training)

syntactic-morphological)-(selection,
orthographical)

11 (omission, (intralingualtransfer)-
syntactic-morphological)-(selection,
/12 We notice one bus that We noticed a bus with 42 lexico- semantic)-(selection, (interlingualtransfer)-
include 42 passengers had passengers had overturned lexico-semantic)-(selection,
/13 inverted. (intralingualtransfer)-
syntactic- morphological)
/14. (intralingual transfer)

15 … and had placed in fall edge. ..and had placed on a selection, lexico-semantic interlingual transfer
cliff

16 …until the police and the … until the police and interlingual transfer
firestation came. the firemen came.
selection, lexico-semantic

(selection, orthographical)- (intralingualtransfer)-

17/ All the passengers shouted
all the passengers shouted and sought help and all the (selection, syntactic- (intralingualtransfer)-
18 and want help and all the people gathered around morphological)-(selection,
people gather around the the bus (intralingual transfer)
syntactic-morphological)
/19 bus.

The whole crowd were in The whole crowd was in omission, lexico-semantic interlingual transfer
tumult for helping them. tumult for helping them.
20

21 (omission, orthographical)- (intralingualtransfer)-

Every moment passed
22 Every moment passed , the bus slipped more (selection, lexico-semantic) (interlingual transfer)
the bus more revert and more.

23
(interlingualtransfer)-
24 40 person of passengers 40 passengers were (addition, lexico-semantic)-
go outside rescued (interlingual transfer)
(selection, lexico-semantic)
Some of these errors occurred because of slip of the tongue. Others may be related to
the factors such as carelessness or anxiety.

Lack of Subject- verb agreement is another kind of errors.

*The children was playing outside(Keshavarz,2016)

Conclusion

As mentioned above I found 24 types of errors during speaking and writing of senior
students of English translation at zabol university in several situations with different
conditions. Some students noticed these errors in their speech or writing, but many of
them were still repeating them despite being aware of the errors. Generally, the types of
errors divided into three groups: Grammatical errors-lexical errors and speech errors.
Lexical and grammatical errors have two sources:

1-Interlingual transfer: Interrlingual; transfer takes place when the speaker’s sentences
affected by their first language

2-Interalingual transfer: Intralingual transfer happened when English rules are not
understood to speakers,

As mentioned earlier there are three reasons for errors:1-cognitive2-social-3affective

A few errors occurred due to slip of the tongue, some errors happened due to stress or
anxiety. Students can feel nervous when they are talking to a lot of people.it is the
influence of affective reason. Social reason happened when students want talk to
someone at high position like department chair. When students asked to talk about an
unusual topic the cognitive reason has occurred.

So I wanted to know which kind of error has more occurred at speaking or writing of
senior students of English translation of Zabol university.

According to the study most of the errors fall into the category of lexical errors that
originate from interlingual transfer.

There is still room for research about this area and I recommend students to further
research on the subject to learn more about these errors.
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