Language Acquisition Errors

Most people begin to learn a native language in the years to follow birth. During childhood years, one increases understanding of the first language, differences in vowel sounds, tones and pitches. The start of babbling and word formations develop, and sentence structures increase. Theories claim acquisition of a second language is principally determined by the structure of an early acquired language, and some second language acquisition transfer errors occur, due to syntactic differences between two languages. As stated by Wolfgang Klein, (1986), “the contrastive hypothesis, conversely, claims that the acquisition of a second language is largely determined by the structure of an earlier acquired language.” If the learners’ second language

Performance errors are errors made by learners when fatigue or rushed; these errors are not serious, and with effort, corrected by the learner (Gefen, 1979). Competence errors are errors which reflect inadequate learning; these errors are more serious, and important to distinguish between mistakes in performance, and errors which reflect adequate competence.

Burt & Kiparsky (1974) describe language errors as local and global errors. Local errors have no influence on communication, and understanding the meaning of spoken language; these errors include variations of articles, prepositions, auxiliaries, nouns and verbs usage. Global errors restrict communication and interrupt the meaning of spoken language; these errors include incorrect sentence structures and word order.

All language learning errors comprise of language components:

(1) the phonological component – the distinction between foreign accents such as stress, intonation, rhythm and speech sounds influencing the language – such as /b/ and /p/;

(2) the morphological component – the production of errors such as “womans”;

(3) the lexical component – direct translation involves inappropriate use of language word order, determinants and tenses - such as “the drink I coffee now”; and

The learners’ understanding of one language, has an impact on personal experience. Transferring the understanding of the native language to the second language, complicates the understanding of the second language. Language has positive and negative influences, the greater the grammar differences between the two languages, the more negative interferences are likely to occur, with effect to grammar, vocabulary, spelling and accents. The relationship between the two languages need consideration to ensure the learner successfully understands and learns the second language