Errors Of Competency In Learning English

In English, we have known four skills that have to be mastered by the learner. Those are speaking, listening, reading, and writing. Speaking and reading are innate skills, we acquire them naturally. Meanwhile the ability to read and especially to compose a good writing is not naturally acquired skills. Both of them are usually learned or practiced in formal instructional setting or at education setting. Hadley (1993) mentions in his book that writing skills must be learned and practiced through experience. Therefore, to make a good writing, we have to practice a lot. Sometimes, we need writing instructors to help us during our practices. When working with their students, the writing instructors should take into account both language skill development

The different causes for error can be caused by different levels of the language learners’ competency in learning English. Richards (1971) classifies error into two categories, those are errors of competence and errors of performance. Errors of competence are the result of the application of rules by the first language learner, which do not correlate to the rule of the second language. It makes the speaker/writer knows what is correct grammatically. While errors of performance refer to the result of a mistake in language use and indicate themselves as false starts, repetition, corrections or slips of the tongue. It occurs frequently in the speech of both second language learners and native speakers and are what actually occurs in practice. The notion of error analysis is coined by Brown (1980). He states that learners will make errors that can be analyzed, observed and classified to show something about the system that the learners use. That notion leads to the term of error analysis that refers to investigation of the errors made by

There are three major theories of the causes of error. The first theory is coined by Hubbard et al. (1983). They proposed that they are three major causes of errors. They are mother tongue interference, over-generalization and errors caused by the teaching method or the teaching material. Meanwhile according to Norrish (1983) the causes of errors are carelessness, translation, and first language interferences. Another proponents, Lin (2012), mentions that there are some major trigger the reason of errors; they are inter-lingual errors, intra-lingual and other