Error types of NNs and the role of L1 in SLA - Essay Example

This research wouldn’t be possible without your participation and I am incredibly grateful for your help. Thanks to Dr.Maggie for helping us in preparing, editing and general guidance through the research and process. The purpose of this paper is twofold. First, it brings together the various theories and views and the research findings in the rules and functions in the second language learning (SLL), second, it shows the importance of the first language in learning second language. SLA as the name suggests is the study of second language acquisition.

This definition has being refined by Dulay, Burt & Krashen (1982, pp10) SLA is “the process of learning another language after the basic of the first have been acquired, starting at about five years of age and thereafter”. In order to define the error types it is first important to know what NNS is. A Non-Native Speaker (NNS) is a person who is learning a language other than his own. Any NNS belonging to any language can learn a foreign language’s rules and laws of grammar and spelling.

But he/she cannot learn the idioms, expressions and word pairings of the language because they cannot be described by the rules or laws of the foreign language or they might require the memorization of special-case rules. Regardless of the knowledge acquired by NNS of the grammatical rules, NNS continue to make a number of language errors. These are the error types of NNS. These errors include (Park et.al. 2008): Apart from the errors types of L1, there is a significant role played by L1 in acquiring L2 in SLA.

According to Krashen (1982) when he talked about the role of first language L1 in second language acquisition SLA that “the only major source of syntactic errors in adult second language performance was the performers first language”. Some of the errors that arise are related to the interlingual errors. It occurs when the NNS’s L1 habits such as patterns or rules prevent the NNS