error analysis of Iranian English learners in the written production

Review of the literature
Foreign language teachers even from 2000 years ago were obsessed with the practical question that what the sources of learners errors in their production were. They wrote contrastive observations about students` native language and the language they were learning as early as the schools of the ancient world (Kelly, 1969).Then the idea of the influence of native language on the second language acquisition was inspired by Jesperson (1912), Palmer (1917) and especially Fries (1945) who “subscribed to the behaviorist analysis of lingusitic competence as a series of habits. Errors considered to be the result of transfer of L1 “habits” but the transfer of some habits are useful and some others harmful (Lado,1957).

Contrastive Analysis (CA) emerged and it was founded on the assumption that L2 learners will tend to transfer to their L2 utterances the formal fatures of L1 (James,1981) and he goes on saying that it only deals with “proaction”.Accordingly, learners, they state, are greatly influenced by their L1. If L1 and L2 match,learning will be facilitated and if they differ, learning will be impeded.In the first case, there is positive transfer and in the second, negative transfer.

The problem but starts with the notion of “transfer” itself. It has created vexing problems and turned to be a controversial notion. It means different things to different people. For Lado (1957) and Fries (1945) transfer is the imposition of native language information on an L2 utterance or sentence, but for Kellerman (1986) and Odlin (1989) it refers to cross-linguistic influence. Schachter (1983,1992) has considered all prior linguistic knowledge including the imperfect knowledge a learner may have of the L2 as transfer and even she claims that transfer is not a process (Gass,1996). Odlin (1989) after discussing the problematic nature of transfer, has brought some observation about what transfer is not and concluded that “Transfer is the influence resulting from similarities and differences between the target language and any other language that has been previously (and perhaps imperfectly) acquiered”.And then he stresses that it is only a working definition And even recently, Pavlenko and Scott (2002) argued that transfer is not unidirectional but bidirectional and simultancous that is shown by paradigmatic and syntagmatic categories. It indicates that how much the notion is complex without any consensus.

According to their own assumption and in order to eradicat errors, contrastivve analysts compare and contrast L1 and L2 to find the similarities and differences and consequently prediet learner difficulty. In the words of Els et al. (1984)the processes of CA involve providing insights into similarities and differences between languages ; explaining and predieting problems in L2 learning and finally developing course materials for language teaching (Mirhassani, 2003). CA was successful in phonetics but because of its problems it is not practiced much, but it is still alive.

Evidence of analyses regarding Persian learners of English is scant. Strain (1968) has worked on a contrastive sketch of the Persian and English sound systems. Schachter (1974) examined the production of English relative clauses by Persian, Arabic, Chineses and Japanese students. She found that Chinese and Japanese produced far fewer relative clauses than did the Persian and Arabic students. Then she goes on saying that it was because of the differences between Chineses and Japanese on the one hand and English on the other. Schachter (1994) also did a study and considered presence of resumptive pronouns in the English interlanguage of persian speakers as transfer. But Samar (1998) did the same study and showed that it accounted for only 4% of the data and concluded that it is not transfer. Their findings were different because of their different sources of the data: the former took from grammar prescriptive books but Samar took the data from the real situations.

Some alternatives to CA also emerged like George’s mechanism of Cross Association (1972) and Newmark and Reibel’s Ignorant Hypothesis (1968) but with the emergence of Cognitivism and collapse of CA, the direction of the analysis reversed. CA gave way to EA and it starts from errors. As it is cited in Ellis (1994), it was not until the 1970s that EA became a recognised part of applied linguistics. Corder (1974) talks about the steps in EA research: Collection of a sample; Identification of errors; Description of errors; Explanation of errors; and Evaluation of errors.

Classification of errors is another controversial issue because the experts do not see eye to eye on it. Corder (1974), for instance, introduced a framework for describing errors according to their systematicity. Dulay, Burt and Krashen (1982) provided a surface strategy taxonomy of errors; omissions; additions; misinformations; and misorderings. Taylor (1986) classified the sources of errors (psycholinguistics; sociolinguistic; epistemic; or in discourse). Dualy and Burt (1974) talked about different types of Goofs.

Despite its shortcomings, EA is still alive and in the recent studies there is no mention of any of the methodological problems involved in EA (Ellis, 1994). It has made a great contribution to SLA research. And some (e.g.Mirhassani, 2003) even believe that “CA with all its limitations is useful in teaching….”.