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Autor: Begoña Ruiz Cordero
Curso: 4,93/5 (14 opiniones) |11860 alumnos|Fecha publicación: 19/12/2005

There are six causes of mistakes but we can join them into four:

Mother tongue interference: One cause of mistake in speaking a foreign language is the influence of the speaker´s first language. Although children appear to be able to learn a foreign language quite easily and to reproduce new sounds very effectively, most older learners experience considerable difficulty. The sound system (phonology) and the grammar of the first language impose themselves on the new language and this leads to a "foreign" pronunciation, faculty grammatical patterns and, occasionally, to the wrong choice of vocabulary. As a result, when people do not know how to say something in a foreign language, one possibility is to use words and structure for their own language and try to make them fit into the foreign language. E.g. a German speaker with a cigarette and no lighter might ask: "have you fire?" instead of "do you have light?"

2.      Overgeneralization: A second cause of mistake is when learners think they know a rule, but in fact they do not know quite enough. The learner can also make up a rule that is simply wrong itself. E.g. "he growed up in Canada" or "your room is more tider than mine"

3.      Thirdly, people may say things that they know are not correct because this is still their best chance of getting their message across. This is another intelligent use of knowledge about things in order to communicate.

4.      Fourthly, mistakes can happen because someone is in a hurry or tired or thinking about something lese. There are differences between mistakes made by native speakers and mistakes made by learners, but slips of the tongue or of the pen are found in everyone´s English.

It´s quite easy to think of possible causes of mistakes that learners make when speaking a foreign language, but it is very difficult indeed to say in anyone´s case exactly what causes a particular mistake to occur. (EDGE, J. Mistakes and correction, Longman 1989; GOWER, R., PHILLIPS, D., WALTERS, S., Teaching Practise Handbook, Heinemann, 1995)

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