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Error Analysis of Verbal Production: A Case Study of Errors Committed by Advanced Learners of Arabic as a Foreign Language.
Abstract
Error analysis of students' verbal production is an area of interest for many researchers and foreign language teachers. Mitchell and Myles, (2004) previously stressed that errors, if studied, could reveal a developing system of the students' L2 language. This system is dynamic, open to changes, and resetting of parameters. Vahdatinejad, (2008) noted that error analysis can be used to determine what a learner still needs to be taught. It provides the necessary information about what is lacking in learners' competence. This is especially true of advanced learners whose capability to maintain a conversation with their interlocutor makes it possible to glide over errors without noting them leading to accuracy problems. A fact that is disappointing to learners who need to display high levels of accuracy that warrant a move to superior level but cannot deal with such errors. It is also disappointing to teachers who face difficulty pinpointing the seemingly sporadic errors that their learners are doing, thus making navigating them to the superior level (which according to the ACTFL guidelines is marked by higher levels of accuracy) more difficult. In an attempt to start a corpus of advanced learners’ errors, I analyzed audio-recorded speaking assignments of fifty advanced AFL students. Errors committed by AFL students have been extracted and classified syntactically and semantically. The goal of the analysis is to: 1) determine the most common errors made by AFL students and the frequency of occurrence of these errors. 2) highlight problems that teachers need to address at this level to help learners reach their superior level of oral proficiency. 3) suggest some teaching techniques and activities to help students overcome these errors. The analysis revealed that some of the most recurrent problems were the incorrect use of the active participles, irregular verb forms, phrasal verbs, idioms, and expressions in L2 as well as some complex sentence structures. Findings of the present study would 1)serve as a guidance to teachers on how to assist advanced learners to overcome their speaking problems so as to reach the superior level, and 2)urge curriculum designers to develop educational material that help overcoming the detected problems in AFL advanced speaking classrooms.
Discipline
Language
Geographic Area
Egypt
Sub Area
Language Acquisition