journal of linguistic studies

especially treated as errors to correct, they will be scatterbrained to some degree, anxious,
even passive. Therefore, it is inimical to second language acquisition. So many
researchers argue that errors could be tolerable, especially those in favour of
communication teaching methods, advocating that there is no need to correct errors. They
say it is natural for learners to produce errors, which will be able to vanish gradually.
Meanwhile different voices come on, they predict it is likely to result in error-fossil, if
errors are not corrected immediately, as a result, they could easily form the fossils in
learners’ mind. Up to now, there is still no agreement over whether to correct errors, how,
when and where.
3. TYPES OF ERRORS AND ITS CORRESPONDING CORRECTIONS
Second language acquisition is a process which advances gradually. During this
period, learners can make various errors. Based on the different standard, there may be
many kinds of divisions, for example, according to the language intelligibility; errors
could be divided into two types, global errors and local errors. The former can be defined
as those that affect comprehension, while the latter usually doesn’t break down
communication. For the global errors, most teachers share similar opinions that such
errors must be corrected, through a variety of ways, such as, prompt, guiding, negotiation
and so on; for the latter, there exists two views: one school holds that local errors will not
hinder the statements from being understood, therefore, it is unnecessary to spend time on
it; while the other argues this type of errors also violate the language rules, if it is not
corrected in time, as time passes, it will deposit in the deep memory, which is hard to
eliminate, so error-fossils appear. And we can also categorize errors by the reason for
their production. Firstly, pre-systematic errors, when learners have no idea about a certain
grammar rule, he commits such errors; secondly, learners misuse some grammar rules. As
a result, the errors produced are called systematic errors; thirdly, post-systematic errors,
learners do know about some grammar rules, but they couldn’t use them correctly and
suitably. Due to the high subjectivity and some disagreements over the error correction
process in question; this category is seldom put into use in teaching activities. At present,
widely-used division is based on psycholinguistics theory. According to linguistic type,
errors could be attributed to four sources:
3.1. INTER-LINGUAL INTERFERENCE
There always exist some similarities between the mother tongue and the target
language. For the similar part, the learner may transfer concepts from the mother tongue
into the target language. But there also exists some diversity between them, so when the
learners feel he could express in the equivalent way, he falls into pitfalls.
For example: *Our group has ten boys and ten girls.
Such sentences appear frequently owing to the influence of Uzbek and Turkish word
order, which in English should be:
There are ten boys and ten girls in our group.
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