Question

write four applications of error analysis please elaborate each in 100 words
​

Answer 1

The knowledge we have of the physical world is obtained by doing experiments and making measurements. It is important to understand how to express such data and how to analyze and draw meaningful conclusions from it.

In doing this it is crucial to understand that all measurements of physical quantities are subject to uncertainties. It is never possible to measure anything exactly. It is good, of course, to make the error as small as possible but it is always there. And in order to draw valid conclusions the error must be indicated and dealt with properly.

Take the measurement of a person's height as an example. Assuming that her height has been determined to be 5' 8", how accurate is our result?

Well, the height of a person depends on how straight she stands, whether she just got up (most people are slightly taller when getting up from a long rest in horizontal position), whether she has her shoes on, and how long her hair is and how it is made up. These inaccuracies could all be called errors of definition. A quantity such as height is not exactly defined without specifying many other circumstances.

Even if you could precisely specify the "circumstances," your result would still have an error associated with it. The scale you are using is of limited accuracy; when you read the scale, you may have to estimate a fraction between the marks on the scale, etc.

If the result of a measurement is to have meaning it cannot consist of the measured value alone. An indication of how accurate the result is must be included also. Indeed, typically more effort is required to determine the error or uncertainty in a measurement than to perform the measurement itself. Thus, the result of any physical measurement has two essential components: (1) A numerical value (in a specified system of units) giving the best estimate possible of the quantity measured, and (2) the degree of uncertainty associated with this estimated value. For example, a measurement of the width of a table would yield a result such as 95.3 +/- 0.1 cm.

Answer 2

In linguistics, according to J. Richard et al., (2002), an error is the use of a word, speech act or grammatical items in such a way it seems imperfect and significant of an incomplete learning (184). It is considered by Norrish (1983, p. 7) as a systematic deviation that happens when a learner has not learnt something, and consistently gets it wrong. However, the attempts made to put the error into context have always gone hand in hand with either language learning and second-language acquisition processes, Hendrickson (1987:357) mentioned that errors are ‘signals’ that indicate an actual learning process taking place and that the learner has not yet mastered or shown a well-structured competence in the target language.

All the definitions seemed to stress either on the systematic deviations triggered in the language learning process, or its indications of the actual situation of the language learner themselves which will later help the monitor be it an applied linguist or particularly the language teacher to solve the problem respecting one of the approaches argued in the Error Analysis (Anefnaf 2017), the occurrence of errors doesn't only indicate that the learner has not learned something yet, but also it gives the linguist the idea of whether the teaching method applied was effective or it needs to be changed.

According to Corder (1976) errors are significant of three things, first to the teacher, in that they tell him, if he or she undertakes a systematic analysis, how far towards that goal the learner has progressed and, consequently, what remains for him to learn. Second, they provide the researcher with evidence of how language is learned or acquired, and what strategies or procedures the learner is employing in his discovery of the language. Third (and in a sense this is their most important aspect) they are indispensable to the learner himself, because we can regard the making of errors as a device the learner uses in order to learn (p. 167). The occurrence of errors is merely signs of ‘’the present inadequacy of our teaching methods’’ (Corder 1976, p. 163).

There have been two schools of thought when it comes to errors analysis and philosophy, the first one, according to Corder (1967) linked the errors commitment with the teaching method arguing that if the teaching method was adequate, the errors would not be committed, the second school believed that we live in an imperfect world and that errors correction is something real and the applied linguist cannot do without it no matter what teaching approach they may use.