Another book from Rod Ellis. From all the three books (Ellis, Brown) I learnt about Contrastive and Error analysis. This is very important to the background of my study as i'm using this method to analyze the data from my study.
This is what i cite from my proposal. In the 60s and 70s, contrastive analysis is used as a methodology in second language acquisition research. Most contrastive analysis studies assumed that errors occurs due to the interference of learners mother tongue and consequently, contrastive analysis may be most predictive at the level of phonology and least predictive at the syntactic level (Richard, 1974) hence learning is facilitated when “learners benefit from positive L1 transfer are encumbered by negative transfer” (James, 1998, p.179).
It is then replaced with Error Analysis which claimed that it is used to predict learner’s errors by comparing the native language and the target language. Learner’s errors are regarded as sources utilized to understand if errors are the result of L1 transfer or developmental or from other explanations. Although what constitutes L2 errors remains unclear, it is important to establish the source of error to understand the process of L2 acquisition (Ellis, 1995).
