Book review. Error Analysis in the world: a bibliography
Reviewed by Eirini Monsela
Error Analysis in the world: a bibliography.
Bernd Spillner (2017). Sprachwissenschaft. Band 37. Berlin: Frank & Timme, 579 p. ISBN 978-3-7329-0356-6, ISBN (E-Book) 978-3-7329-9680-3, ISSN 1862-6149
Reviewed by Eirini Monsela (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.)
The present bibliography by the German polyglot linguist Bernd Spillner is a sequel to the first volume, “Error Analysis. A comprehensive bibliography”, published by Benjamins in 1991. In this extended bibliography abouterroranalysis in several source and target languages, both intralingual and interlingual, Spillner first sets out the importance of error analysis in the mother tongue acquisition and communication for understanding errors in the foreign language acquisition (see p. 7). He further explains his principal reason for its publication: despite the great number of studies analysing the errors that learners make in acquiring a foreign language, there is as yet no satisfactory overview summarising them. Regarding this, he underlines the great necessity to effectively compare the already excitable big amount of error analysis results.
The book cites more than 6000 publications about error analysis written in English, German, French, Italian, Spanish and Russian. The titles are listed in alphabetical order (in the authors’ last names) and they focus mainly on the topics of ‘code switching’ and ‘corrective feedback’. The attached CD-ROM, which contains all the titles of the publications cited in the book, provides a useful digital tool for keyword searching.