The Necessity to Make Errors: The case of German learners of Spanish

Abstract

Learners of foreign languages make errors. There has been much debate over whether these errors are to be viewed as something bad, something wrong or something to be avoided. This paper analyses the efficiency of exercises aimed at avoiding the most frequent mistakes German beginning learners of Spanish make. A comparative study shows that learners who make these exercises improve only over their frequency of orthographic errors, but all other types of errors and the total number of errors remain the same as learners who do not make these exercises.