INTRODUCTION

　　In this chapter, I am going to discuss the significance of uating Error Analysis (EA) studies in 1970s and early 1980s and set the proper perspective toward the use of learner corpora in analysing learner language errors in order to better understand the process and sequence of acquisition of English as a second/foreign language.

　　Before 1960s, when the behaviouristic viewpoint of language learning was prevailing, learner errors were considered something undesirable and to be avoided. It is because in behaviourists perspectives, people learn by responding to external stimuli and receiving proper reinforcement. A proper habit is being formed by reinforcement, hence learning takes place. Therefore, errors were considered to be a wrong response to the stimulus, which should be corrected immediately after they were made. Unless corrected properly, the error became a habit and a wrong behavioural pattern would stick in your mind.

　　This viewpoint of learning influenced greatly the language classroom, where teachers concentrated on the mimicry and memorisation of target forms and tried to instill the correct patterns of the form into learners' mind. If learners made any mistake while repeating words, phrases or sentences,  the teacher corrected their mistakes immediately. Errors were regarded as something you should avoid and making an error was considered to be fatal to proper language learning processes.

　　This belief of learning was eventually discarded by the well-known radically different perspective proposed by N. Chomsky (1957). He wrote in his paper against B.F. Skinner, that human learning, especially language acquisition, cannot be explained by simply starting off with a "tabula rasa" state of mind. He claimed that human beings must have a certain kind of innate capacity which can guide you through a vast number of sentence generation possibilities and have a child acquire a grammar of that language until the age of five or si