Language learners are constantly exposed to challenges in their learning process. It is appropriate to be able to identify the different factors that play an essential role in the journey of learning English. In this way, recognize the weaknesses is important to start with the activities to correct several skills that need attention. Therefore, this leads to focusing on the errors, a normal thing for students. It is considered by Norrish as a systematic deviation that happens when a learner has not learnt something, and consistently gets it wrong. Consequently, there is a method denominated Error Analysis that is concerned with the compilation, study, and analysis of errors made by second language learners and aims at investigating aspects of second language acquisition.

There are mainly two major sources of errors in second language learning. The first source is interference from the native language while the second source can be attributed to intralingual and developmental factors. The native language of learners plays a significant role in learning a second language. Errors due to the influence of the native language are called interlingual errors. Interlingual errors are also called transfer or interference errors. The view that the native language plays a mostly negative role was emphasized as early as the forties and tile fifties by Fries (1945) and Lado (1957). Although recently researchers tend to minimize interlingual errors and emphasize intralingual and developmental errors that are due to the difficulty of the second/target language. Intralingual and developmental factors include the following: simplification, overgeneralization, hypercorrection, faulty teaching, fossilization, avoidance, inadequate learning, and false concepts hypothesized. 

Teachers can and should correct all errors committed by their students. The following are general guidelines in correcting second language learning errors:

I.             Teachers should correct errors affecting intelligibility, errors that interfere with the general meaning and understandability of utterances. In this connection, teachers should concentrate on correcting global errors more than local errors.

II.            High frequency and generality errors should be corrected more often than less frequent errors. For example, the omission of the third person Singular s is an error of high frequency and generality.

III.          Teachers should put more emphasis on correcting errors affecting a large percentage of their students. This factor is clearly related to the second factor above.

IV.          Stigmatizing or irritating errors should be paid more attention to. Pupils who come from lower socioeconomic classes are conscious of and very sensitive to ridicule about their informal variety of language from students from higher socioeconomic classes who speak a more formal and prestigious variety of the language.

V.           Finally, errors relevant to a pedagogical focus should receive more attention from the teacher than other errors. For example, if the focus of the lesson is the use of the present perfect tense, the correction of errors involving prepositions, articles, and demonstratives in this lesson should not be emphasized by the teacher because if he/she did, the attention of the students would be distracted from the focus of the lesson which, in this instance, is the use of the present perfect tense.