The significance of learners' errors 11
undertakes a systematic analysis, how far towards the goal the learner has progressed and, consequently, what remains for him to learn. Second, they provide to the researcher evidence of how language is learnt or acquired, what strategies or procedures the learner is employing in his discovery of the language. Thirdly (and in a sense this is their most important aspect) they are indispensable to the learner himself, because we can regard the making of errors as a device the learner uses in order to learn. It is a way the learner has of testing his hypotheses about the nature of the language he is learning. The making of errors then is a strategy employed both by children acquiring their mother tongue and by those learning a second language.
Although the following dialogue was recorded during the study of child language acquisition it bears unmistakable similarities to dialogues which are a daily experience in the second language teaching classroom:
Mother Did Billy have his egg cut up for him at breakfast?
Child Yes, I showeds him.
Mother You what?
Child I showed him.
Mother You showed him?
Child I seed him.
Mother Ah, you saw him.
Child Yes, I saw him.
Here the child within a short exchange appears to have tested three hypotheses: one relating to the concord of subject and verb in a past tense, another about the meaning of show and see and a third about the form of the irregular past tense of see. It only remains to be pointed out that if the child had answered / saw him immediately, we would have no means of knowing whether he had merely repeated a model sentence or had already learnt the three rules just mentioned. Only a longitudinal study of the child's development could answer such a question. It is also interesting to observe the techniques used by the mother to 'correct' the child. Only in the case of one error did she provide the correct form herself: You saw him. In both other cases, it was sufficient for her to query the child's utterance in such a form as: You what? or You showed him? Simple provision of the correct form may not always be the only, or indeed the most effective, form of correction since it bars the way to the learner testing alternative hypotheses. Making a learner try to discover the right form could often be more instructive to both learner and teacher. This is the import of Carroll's proposal already referred to.