Journal of English Language Teaching

The instrumental role of error analysis in developing an effective ESL pedagogy: A review

Dr. S. Harikrishna Rao

Dept. of English, GMR Institute of Technology, Srikakulam, Andhra Pradesh

Keywords: Error Analysis, SLA, Interlanguage, Errors, LAD

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Abstract

With the advent of cognitive psychology, the validity of behavioral psychology, which is the prime-philosophical realization of contrastive analysis, has been mitigated in Second Language Acquisition Research. Cognitive psychology prognosticates that language learning is a rule-governed or creative structure acquisition rather than habit formation, and perceives the rule governed system-acquisition as to be cognitively processed through ‘the hypotheses formation and testing’ rather than through ‘stimulus and reinforcement’. This revolutionary perspective intensely changes SLA process and practice from the external to internal, in other words, from sociological to biological process of learning. As a consequence, Error Analysis has been evolved as a different applied linguistics method to look into the ESL learner errors and their potential sources. The paper focuses on the different insights and methods of Error Analysis and their predictability to verify and remediate ESL errors.

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