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Research in first language acquisition has given an enormous influence on the study of second and foreign languages over the past few decades. This in turn has resulted in many changes concerning methodology.
In this essay, types of mistakes are examined and two different theoretical views about errors are discussed in order for teachers of English to identify the mistakes and take effective measures in present English teaching in China’s junior middle schools.

1、Types of mistakes and their causes
In the section, what a mistake is and what leads to a mistake in language learning are explained so that teachers can decide how to deal with learners’mistakes in oral English practice.
First of all, differences between mistakes, slips, errors and attempts are dealt with. The word mistake is used in a general sense. Those mistakes which stu-dents themselves can correct are slips. Errors are those that students can not self-correct but their teachers think they are familiar with the right forms. When students try to express what is beyond their language ability, the mistakes they make are called attempts (Edge, 1989). What causes different types of mistakes?
Secondly, let us consider the cause of mistakes. Many mistakes may have ambiguous sources, so that sometimes it is very difficult to decide the cause of a specific mistake. But most linguists agree that there are three major causes:“mother-tongue interference”,“overgeneralization”and“errors encouraged by teaching material or method”(Hubbard, 1983).
As far as mother-tongue interference is concerned, there is a kind of mistakes that learners some-times make when they use their previous mother-tongue knowledge as a means of expressing their ideas. For Chinese learners of English, the typical instances transferred from our mother tongue are the use of ‘because...so’. Although it is correct to use these two conjunctives together in combining sentences in Chinese, it is wrong to do so in English. And this is similar with ‘although...but’.
Another example of mother-tongue interference is that we often say“he”while we really mean“she”.The cause is this: the two Chinese characters arespelled differently while their pronunciations are the same. This may result in mistakes from which even some advanced learners cannot get away.
The second cause of mistakes is called overgeneralization, of which learners sometimes make intralingual mistakes in language learning when they use a rule beyond its limits. Here is an example: having learned a rule for forming plurals, a student may produce“I saw two mouses”, in which the attempt ‘mouses’is one of the exceptions to the rule and should be spelled as‘mice’. Similar mistakes like ‘comed’ and ‘goed’occur from time to time. Some other mistakes may be the direct result of faulty teaching materials, and over - using some structures. There is time when teachers over-emphasize or make learners over-practice the present continuous. Then the following mistakes appear: I am knowing the structures now. (I know...)
She is needing the book very much. (She needs...)
As for the sentence“We think to go there.”, we can see that“think to go”is the over-generalizing of the verb infinitive pattern“want to ...”. So it can be concluded that different mistakes can at times be interpreted as different causes.

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