The findings of recent studies in Error Analysis and the acquisition sequence reveal that familiarity with the types of errors students actually make and their degree of difficulty can tell us more about the types of variables that most strongly influence second language (L2) learning. This in turn may have some implications for determining the sequence and emphasis of instruction for individual learners, in addition to providing information about the nature of L2 acquisition process in general. The objective of this study was to investigate the sources of errors made and the difficulty order followed by adult Iranian students in their learning of certain grammatical structures of English. The general difficulty order found here was in many ways similar to the orders reported in other L2 studies for adult ESL learners indicating that adults follow a natural and similar sequence in learning the grammatical structures of English and also that the structural difficulty order might be universal for all adults learning a second or foreign language. However, the results of a further analysis revealed that EFL adults and ESL children follow different developmental sequence in learning the grammatical structures of English, although previous studies have found similar orders for ESL adults and ESL children (Krashen, 1976; Fuller, 1978). Furthermore, insignificant correlation found between the difficulty order of this study and the order obtained for children learning English natively indicated that the difficulty order followed by adult (and child) learners of English is different from the order that children follow in learning English as their first language. The results of the error analysis showed that in each proficiency group (elementary, intermediate, and advanced) the subjects' reliance on developmental strategy was greater than on the strategy of native / language transfer and that, regardless of the type of error, the frequency of occurrence of errors is directly proportional to the proficiency level of the learner. That is, the learner's errors of any type will decrease with his progress in the target language. However, it may be the case that differences in language learning situations, i.e., ESL and EFL, and in the type of testing instrument used may be responsible for the occurrence of different types of errors and also for their distributions within the proficiency level of the individual learners. Furthermore, the findings of this study, while providing strong support for the claim that interference from the mother tongue is not the only source of errors adult L2 learners make, but rather a large number of errors made by these learners can be explained due to interference from the target language, indicate that in addition to these two major sources of errors, other factors such as teaching and testing materials and techniques, type of language exposures available to the learner, transfer from a third or more languages known by the learner, and so on, should also be evaluated as the causes of errors in L2 learning. On the basis of these findings, therefore, a systematic approach to the problem of errors and their possible sources as predictors of areas of difficulty in L2 learning should include the information gained from the results of both Contrastive- and Error Analysis studies. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 41-01, Section: A, page: 0139. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1979.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:fsu.edu/oai:fsu.digital.flvc.org:fsu_74014 |
| Contributors | JAVIDAN, ESMAIL., The Florida State University |
| Source Sets | Florida State University |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Text |
| Format | 193 p. |
| Rights | On campus use only. |
| Relation | Dissertation Abstracts International |
Page generated in 0.002 seconds