An analysis of errors made by twenty English speaking students learning the Korean language has been performed in order to determine the sources of errors.
Supporters of the Contrastive Analysis Hypothesis claim that the existing mother tongue habit ...
An analysis of errors made by twenty English speaking students learning the Korean language has been performed in order to determine the sources of errors.
Supporters of the Contrastive Analysis Hypothesis claim that the existing mother tongue habit interferes with learning a second language, and thus that a taxanomy of linguistics contrasts between the learner's mother tongue and the second language he is learning makes it possible to predict the difficulties he will encounter.
Supporters of Error Analysis, however, point out that second-language learning is, like first-language learning, a creative process of constructing a system, and that most errors made by a second-language learner can, in fact, be attributed to the complexity of the target language itself.
In order to investigate what strategies the English speaker employs in learning Korean as a foreign language, a test requiring a written translation of thirty English sentences was administered to twenty speakers of English who are currently taking a Korean language course at The University of Maryland in the Eighth United States Army compound, Seoul, Korea.
The error types were categorized into over-generalization, transfer, translation and indeterminate origin.
The results of the investigation are: First, the errors made by the elementary level students are found not qualitatively different from those made by the intermediate level students. Second, overgeneralization is found to have been employed by both groups of students as the major strategy. Third, one of the major characteristics of generalization is found to be simplification of the syntactic system of the target language.