Many people nowadays are in contact with a foreign language, specially, English, one

of the most spoken languages in the world after Chinese and Spanish. According to
Weinreich (1979), two or more languages will be said to be in contact if they are used
alternately by the same person. Weinreich (1979) asserts that because of being in
contact with a foreign language (FL), or with a second language, the interference
phenomena appear. And the greater the difference between the systems, the greater is
the learning problem and the potential area of interference. For this reason, “great or
small, the differences and similarities between the languages in contact must be
exhaustively stated for every domain – phonic, grammatical, and lexical- as a
prerequisite to an analysis of interference” (Weinreich, 1979). The term 'interference'
causes a negative effect as it is defined as something that gets in the way.

Most of the interferences made by students who are learning a second language happen
when they are required to use that language in a creative way. That is to say, most of the
errors occur when students try to write an essay or use the language in the speaking
skill, but not only we must attribute these errors to these skills, but also to the reading
and listening ones due to the fact that students must put all their attention to try to
understand what they are listening or reading. When learners of second language want
to write or speak in the target language, they tend to rely on their first language
structures. If the structures are different, then a lot of errors occur in L1 thus this
indicates an interference of first language on second language (Decherts & Dllis, as
cited in Derakhshan, Ali Karimi, Elham, 2015: 2)
In order to see easily the similarities and differences between two languages in a second
language acquisition (SLA), Chomsky proposed the theory of Principles and
Parameters.

The set of principles, which has been conceptualized as Universal Grammar (UG), is
understood as the properties that all languages in the world have. Nevertheless, some of
these principles allow for parameters which constitute the possibility of variation among
languages in the way their constructions are realised.

Between the three domains mentioned, phonic, grammatical and lexical, in this work we
will focus on the grammatical one. Weinreich (1979) affirms that the problem of
grammatical interference is one of considerable complexity. And the contrary was
defended in a contemporary restatement, “there is no limit in principle to the influence
which one morphological system may have upon another.” (in Weinreich, 1979). There
will always be scholars who do not have the same theory. So in order to affirm one of
the theories mentioned, each of the languages must be analyzed separately despite the
differences they may have grammatically.

Before an analysis of both languages, it is considerable to make a classification of

problems of general grammar. Weinreich (1979) calls them “treacherous classificatory
problems of general grammar”:

a. Morphemes (segments of utterances, including prosodic features which

differentiate simple morphemes) are distinguished from Grammatical Relations,
including: (1) order; (2) agreement, dependence, and similar relations between
grammatical units; and (3) modulations of stress and pitch.
b. More or less obligatory categories. In a language, the expression of some
categories is obviously more obligatory than that of others. Whenever an action
is described by a finite verb in English, for example, its time in relation to the
speech event must be expressed by a tense. This category is more important than
specifying, for example, the sex of animate objects. Relations, too, can be more
and less obligatory.
c. Greater or lesser syntagmatic boundness of morphemes used to express
categories. The English morpheme he in he loved, is, in turn, less bound than the
French il, since it is even more separable and is used in other functions.

With this scheme, an analysis of the two languages can be made more easily if the
mentioned problems are taken into account. That is to say, a contrastive analysis
between both languages became apparent. Firstly, although Lado (1957, in Paul
Lennon) sought to identify areas of language learning difficulty, in practice contrastive
analysis was used to predict error. That it, errors and mistakes can be avoided. Paul
Lennon in Contrastive analysis as a predictor of error answers to Lado’s hypothesis:

“This may not necessarily be true since language difficulty is a psycholinguistic

concept, whereas error is part of language product. Learners may focus a lot of
attention on those aspects of the language they perceive as difficult so as not to
make mistakes, and may actually make mistakes in areas where they do not
perceive great difficulty.”

According to Paul Lennon, these are the “careless mistakes” in traditional language
teaching terms. “Contrastive analysis does not provide for the possibility that the learner
actively sets about the learning task, but rather sees the learner as a passive recipient of
language interference operating in a mechanistic fashion outside the learner’s control.”
(Paul Lennon). Proponents of contrastive analysis claim that interference from learners’
L1 is the prime cause, or even the unique cause of difficulty in L2 learning (Kant,
2015). However, learners can make mistakes in some parts of the language where their
first language does not influence the L2 learning. For example, when the student has to
choose between a simple or a progressive tense. These are called “developmental
errors” (Paul Lennon). However, as a consequence, these errors cannot be predicted in
the contrastive analysis.

Beyond the fact that interference seems to be a key factor in L2 acquisition and in
response to criticism regarding error prediction and their non-occurrence, many studies
(James, 1971, Schachter, 1974, and Fisiak, 1981b in Kant, 2015) substantiate that the
non-occurrence of an error does not invalidate the prediction. Fisiak (1981b: 7, in Kant,
2015) argues that “the value and importance of Contrastive Analysis lies in its ability to
indicate potential areas of interference and errors.” Nonetheless, “if many errors occur
in learners’ performance, which are not predicted by Contrastive analysis, we should
assume that all learning problems are not language specific” (Kant, 2015: 6).

As a consequence, many researchers relied on error analysis (EA). “It is a type of

linguistic analysis that focuses on the errors learners make, in comparing the errors
made in the target language and the constructions of that target language” (Khansir
2012: 1029, in Kant, 2015: 7). The original claim of EA was that, instead of predicting
learners’ difficulties, one should rather observe what problems actually occur through a
systematic study of learners’ errors (Kant, 2015: 7).

Its methodology, as elaborated by Corder (1974 in Kant, 2015: 7), consists of five major
steps:

1. The selection of a corpus of language (L2 or L3 production of students).

2. The identification of errors in the corpus.
3. The classification of identified errors.
4. The explanation of the causes of the errors.
5. The evaluation of the errors.

Drawing heavily on Chomsky’s (1965, in Paul Lennon) view of first language

acquisition, he suggested that just as for the child acquiring its mother tongue the
language evolves in a more or less fixed pattern, so the foreign language learner may
possess an “inbuilt syllabus” which determines the order in which the language system
is acquired and which is largely independent of the order of the external syllabus
according to which the classroom learner is ostensibly learning. Corder further
suggested that studying error might supply clues to this inbuilt order of acquisition,
persistent errors indicating those elements acquired late. So that Error analysis focuses
on real data of errors, and on the other hand, contrastive analysis deals with competence
and theoretical issues (Kant, 2015: 46).

However, error analysis may make some mistakes as well in the analysis. According to
Johansson (2008: 114 in Kant, 2015: 46), “EA hypothesis can be criticized on both its
methodological procedures and theoretical problems which are mainly related to
difficulties of identifying, quantifying, and explaining errors.” Furthermore, error
analysis focuses only on the procedure of error, that is, learners tend to avoid those parts
of the language that they think is too difficult to produce. So, if they do not make
mistakes in those parts of the language they are not producing, error analysis cannot
analyse those errors. Therefore, in this perspective one can claim that EA too is not in a
position to identify all the learning difficulties (Kant, 2015: 47).

As a consequence, error analysis has become very problematic. The distinction between
“errors” and “mistakes” is highly problematic since in performance correct and
incorrect forms of a single target often occur side by side (Paul Lennon: 5). There are
problems of classification. Classification of errors depends on error being localisable to
the domains of phonology/graphology, morphology, syntax, lexis, discourse. (Paul
Lennon: 5). Kiparsky (1974, in Paul Lennon: 5) first drew attention to what they called
“global errors”, which are difficult to localise to a specific item and seem to extend over
the whole sentence. An example might be a sentence like “Well, there’s a great hurry
around”.

This shows that analysing errors does not demonstrate that they can be avoided. Many
aspects must be taken into account, not only errors but also the student's complete
learning of the foreign language. Issa Kanté (2015: 8) asserts that “It also shows that CA
should be used hand in hand with EA if we aim at fully explaining learners’ errors. In
other words, no single approach/hypothesis, strong or weak, can tackle all the issues
encountered in L2 or L3 learning.” Thus, due to all the problems offered by error
analysis, it lost credibility even though if error analysis and contrastive analysis worked
together, they would have better results. In addition, as a consequence another type of
analysis appeared, interlanguage hypothesis.