SECOND-LANGUAGE ACQUISITION AND ERROR ANALYSIS

Abstract

English has a critical role in creating connection between people from all over the world in a variety of industries. That is why many people in developing countries acquire English as a second language and Azerbaijan is one of them. Many people learn English by taking different English language courses. Speaking one of the challenging skills among language abilities. Students tend to make some errors when they speak in a second language. This paper explains what second language acquisition is and how to do error-analysis. Later the paper analyses the most typical English errors by upper-intermediate level Azeri ESL learners in speaking. The main aim the current research is to identify the most typical speaking errors of Azerbaijani university students who are taking General English lessons at a language centre in Baku, Azerbaijan. The main resources of the data consist of recordings of students when having daily conversation in English with teachers and feedback by teachers for their speech. All feedback by teachers is analysed and typical errors are found out by the researcher. In total, twenty-five students and eight teachers attended in the research. Ninety-six recordings were provided with feedback by teachers and ninety-six feedback samples for students were analysed by the researcher. Three research questions are asked and the researcher analysed three types of errors including grammar, lexical and pronunciation, also their specific error patterns. All results including frequency of above-mentioned errors are shown in tables and figures. This part of the study can serve as an example for large-scale studies on analysing typical errors and benefit students and also teaching English programs. Teachers can use these findings as a resource to teach their students and help them to avoid typical errors while speaking. Keywords: second language, error analysis, common mistakes, language acquisition, speaking.