Probably all foreign language teachers would agree with Edge s comment, but they would not necessarily agree on how we should correct errors our students make. Yet error correction remains one of the most contentious and misunderstood issues in the second and foreign language teaching profession. This position is based on the fact that errors are normal and unavoidable during the learning process.
Errors occur for many reasons.
One obvious cause is interference from the native language. A learner may make errors because she assumes that the target language and her native language are similar, when in fact they are different. This kind of overgeneralization is also the cause of many mistaken guesses. Another obvious cause is simply an incomplete knowledge of the target language. A third common cause of errors is the complexity of the target language.