A Systemic Analysis Of Elementary School Learners' Errors In EFL Learning And Use

In the teaching of English as a foreign language(EFL)in the elementary school,teachers need to analyze and treat the errors the learners make in their EFL learning and use.Due to the complexity of the errors and the limitation of teachers' perspectives,however,teachers tend to understand the errors only vaguely and partially and fail to analyze them systematically.Meanwhile,researchers in the field of EFL learning and teaching have been studying errors from various perspectives and have gained much insight into them.Studies so far,however,are much limited by their blurred and incomplete understanding of errors and have largely neglected the elementary school EFL learners.Oriented to the above practical and academic problems,therefore,the present study attempts to make a systemic case analysis of the errors made by learners in their sixth year of the elementary school,in the light of systemic thinking,on the basis of relevant language learning theories,with 80 EFL learners from a certain elementary school in China as subjects(each with output from 6 oral and written tests),and through the methods and procedures developed by Stephen Pit Corder and others,so as to obtain a systemic understanding of the errors in terms of its nature,types,causes and effects,which may constitute a solid basis for systemically treating the errors and optimally conducting EFL instruction in the elementary school.Results generated from the study reveal(1)that the errors made by sixth year elementary school EFL learners are the manifestations of the deviations of their interlanguage from the target language in various degrees and in different aspects,(2)that they may be classified into phonetic,lexical,grammatical and pragmatic errors,(3)that they are caused variously by socio-cultural,situational(input-related and interactional),psychological or affective(motivational),cognitive(related to learning strategies,language transfer,Universal Grammar)factors,and(4)that they are often serious/global and affects the realization of language functions.It is therefore suggested that strategies to treat errors and to conduct EFL teaching need to be based on the above findings.This study may be meaningful to the teaching of EFL in Chinese elementary schools both practically and academically.In terms of teaching practice,it may hopefully help to solve the problem of the practicing teachers' inadequate understanding and treatment of their EFL learners' errors.In terms of educational research,this study may hopefully help to solve the problem of the negligence of elementary school learners' errors and the inadequate philosophical guideline and methodology in the investigation of EFL teaching.