Errors in Language Learning and Use is an up-to-date introduction and guide to the study of errors in language, and is also a critical survey of previous work. Error Analysis occupies a central position within Applied Linguistics, and seeks to clarify questions such as `Does correctness matter?', `Is it more important to speak fluently and write imaginatively or to communicate one's message?' Carl James provides a scholarly and well-illustrated theoretical and historical background to the field of Error Analysis. The reader is led from definitions of error and related concepts, to categorization of types of linguistic deviance, discussion of error gravities, the utility of teacher correction and towards writing learner profiles. Throughout, the text is guided by considerable practical experience in language education in a range of classroom contexts worldwide.

Linguistic errors are manifold, e.g. in the mother tongue, in the acquisition of foreign languages, in translations, as slip of the tongue or typo. The present compilation of all subject-related publications is a comprehensive bibliography for the field of linguistic errors. In a compact introduction, Bernd Spillner additionally provides an overview of linguistic, didactic and psycholinguistic methods of the analysis and assessment of the errors and their therapy. For the first time, publications from numerous countries around the world were included which have not yet been considered. With the attached CD-ROM making the bibliography searchable for keywords in many languages to find relevant publications among the more than 6.000 titles, this is a very useful handbook for all linguists and teachers.

Seminar paper from the year 2003 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 1,5, Free University of Berlin (Institut für Englische Philologie), language: English, abstract: This research paper compares contrastive analysis with the error analysis approach in respect of their treatment of avoidance behaviour. It considers several researches on avoidance behaviour and shows that contrastive analysis predicts the avoidance phenomenon in most cases and, therefore, gives a complete description of the areas of difficulty for learners of a second language. There exist two different approaches for the identification of possible learning problems in the second language acquisition: contrastive analysis and error analysis. A number of proponents of an error analysis approach claim that contrastive analysis cannot serve as an adequate tool for identifying the areas of difficulty for learners of a second language. But on the other hand, it has been noticed that error analysis is not able to explain the avoidance phenomenon, since error analysis registers only the errors done by learners of a second language. Avoidance behaviour represents a communicative strategy of a learner of a second language by which the learner prefers using a simpler form instead of the target linguistic element for the reason of difficulty on the part of the target feature. Consequently, avoidance behaviour serves as a manifestation of learning problems, and its results should be definitely considered when compiling language syllabi and tests.