Errors vs Mistakes

Posted on June 24, 2009 by admin
a mistake vs an error

According to Corder (1967) cited by Ellis (2008), a ‘mistake’ is a deviation in learner language that occurs when learners fail to perform their competence. It is a lapse that reflects processing problems. An error, on the other hand, is a deviation in learner language which results from lack of knowledge of the correct rule (pp. 971, 961).


global errors vs local errors

Global errors are errors that affect overall sentence organization (for example, wrong word order). They are likely to have a marked effect on comprehension (R. Ellis, 2008, p. 964).
Local errors are errors that affect single elements in a sentence (for example, errors in the use of inflections or grammatical functors [sic] (R. Ellis, 2008, p. 970).

Source:  Ellis., R.  (2008). The Study of Second Language Acquisition. 2nd ed. Oxford: OUP.

About admin

I am an English (EFL/ESL) teacher specializing in blended & web-based teaching English for Business, Academic & General Purposes to adults. I am particularly eager to teach conversation and accent reduction classes to speakers of Russian & Estonian, because I can speak the respective languages well, and know all about the problems that speakers of these two languages encounter, and what can be done to address those problems successfully.
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One Response to Errors vs Mistakes

  1. Alex Case says:
    June 25, 2009 at 12:41 pm

    Good quotes and good sources. The obvious next post would be what that means about error correction etc

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