Avoidance is a learner strategy in which difficult L2 structures are systematically underproduced or replaced with simpler alternatives. Unlike most interlanguage phenomena, the diagnostic evidence is the absence of a form rather than its incorrect production, making avoidance invisible to traditional error analysis.
Jacqueline Schachter's landmark study, titled "An error in error analysis," examined the production of English relative clauses by speakers of Persian, Arabic, Chinese, and Japanese. Chinese and Japanese learners produced far fewer relative clauses than Persian and Arabic learners, yet made fewer errors on the ones they did produce. A pure error analysis would have concluded that relative clauses were unproblematic for the East Asian group.
Schachter's insight: the Chinese and Japanese learners were avoiding the structure entirely because their L1 relativisation patterns are structurally distant from English (head-final vs head-initial). The Persian and Arabic learners, whose L1s have closer relative clause structures, attempted more and erred more, but were actually further along in acquisition.
This study rehabilitated contrastive analysis by showing that L1–L2 distance predicts not just errors but also avoidance patterns.
| Type | Description |
|---|---|
| Syntactic avoidance | Avoiding complex structures (relative clauses, passives, conditionals) |
| Lexical avoidance | Using known words instead of attempting new vocabulary |
| Phonological avoidance | Avoiding words containing difficult sounds |
| Topic avoidance | Steering conversation away from areas requiring difficult language |
Because avoidance produces no errors, it requires comparison: