Role and Relevance of the Learners’ Errors in Second Language Acquisition

Language is an important phenomenon of socialisation process that helps to realise and experience the life and assists to convey emotions, feelings, ideas, etc. Language can be acquire or learn. Ellis (1985:292) writes, “Acquisition for Krashen, consists of the spontaneous process of rule internalization that results from natural language use, while ‘learning’ consists of conscious L2 knowledge through formal study.’’ The present study does not make any difference between acquisition and learning. Bothe terms are used synonym. Second Language Acquisition (hereafter, SLA) refers to the acquisition of any other language, after the acquisition of the mother tongue (hereafter, MT). The process of SLA, like that of first language acquisition, is very complex and involves many interrelated factors that affect the performance of learners. SLA is the acquisition of the other subsequent language structures only to express acquired content of the first language. Learners acquire a second language by making use of existing knowledge of the native language, general learning strategies, or universal properties of the language to internalize knowledge of the second language. These processes serve as a means by which a learner constructs an interlanguage (Selinker1974:31). It refers to a set of second language learners’ utterances that are not identical to the learners’ L1 and L2 in the process of the learners’ attempted meaningful performance in a second language. Such utterances are natural but considered as error. Error is a kind of psychological fallacy that occurs due to conscious or unconscious failure to distinguish between right and wrong judgement. Errors are not negative but progressive indicator for language learner. The present paper is an attempt to assess the role and relevance of errors in the acquisition of second language