From Errors of Lower Element Syntactic Concepts to Analytical Teaching.

Abstract

Second language learners and users of the English language are bilinguals who have acquired a reasonable mastery of their mother tongue or the language of their immediate environment before being exposed to the English language in school. This situation often results in the English language being strongly influenced by their first language. This is commonly manifested in the type of errors that second language learners and users make In their writing due to the transfer of the rules from their mother tongue or their first language to English. In this paper, I argue that some of the common errors which plague second language learners and users are caused by inadequate mastery of lower element syntactic concepts such as number, person, case, gender, tense and concord. The argument is based mostly on three contrastive and error analysis investigations as well as the errors encountered in my students’ written work in almost two decades of lecturing in three countries - Nigeria, Swaziland and Namibia. I conclude by advocating for analytical teaching in order for learners to understand the contrast in these concepts between their languages and English.