Error Analysis and Its Relevance to the Course Designer

Abstract

Some ten years ago, I was engaged in preparing a thesis for my Master’s degree at a university in England. When I told my colleagues (we were eleven) that I had chosen as my topic ‘Error Analysis’, one of them snorted ‘Error Analysis is dead’. Today, however, it appears to have been resurrected but sadly with the same body as before. At that time analysis was usually presented in the form of a catalogue listing the features and their frequency as a percentage of the corpus of errors. Today it seems that the same technique is still being used, and one questions the usefulness to the teacher of such a presentation. Most teachers are able to recognise the errors in such a list, but more pertinently, I think, they would welcome an attempt at explaining the factors etc. which produced these errors. One hopes therefore that a briefer re-statement of the principles involved in ‘Error Analysis’ as I saw them might help push back the frontiers of English Language teaching.