Autor: prof. Bogdan Georgiana
Sursă imagine: https://www.jagranjosh.com/articles/7-tips-to-tell-how-students-should-learn-from-their-mistakes-1512631470-1
One of the things that puzzles many teachers is why students go on making the same mistakes even when those mistakes have been repeatedly pointed out to them. Yet not all mistakes are the same; sometimes they seem to be deeply ingrained, yet at other times students correct themselves with apparent ease.
In his book on mistakes and correction, Julian Edge suggested that we can divide mistakes into three broad categories: ” slips” ( that is mistakes which students can correct themselves once the mistake has been pointed out to them), „errors” (mistakes which they can’t correct themselves – and which therefore need explanation) and ” attempts” ( that is when a student tries to say something but does not yet know the correct way of saying it) (Edge 1989: Chapter 2). Of these, it is the category of ” error” that most concerns teachers, though the students’ ” attempts” will tell us a lot about their current knowledge – and may well provide chances for opportunistic teaching.
It is widely accepted that there are two distinct sources for the errors which most, if not all, students display.
First language „interference”: students who learn English as a second language already have a deep knowledge of at least one other language. Where that L1 ( first language) and the variety of English they are learning come into contact with each other, there are often confusions which provoke errors in a learner’s use of English. This can be at the level of sounds: Arabic, for example, does not have a phonemic distinction between /f/ and /v/, and Arabic speakers may well say „ferry” when they mean ” very”. It can be at the level of grammar, where a student’s first language has a subtly different system: French students often have trouble with the present perfect because there is a similar form in French but the same concept is expressed slightly differently; Japanese students have problems with article usage because Japanese doe not use the same system of reference and so on. It may, finally, be at the level of word usage, where similar sounding words have slightly different meanings: ” libreria” in Spanish and ” librărie” in Romanian means ” bookshop”, not ” library”; ” embarasada” in Spanish means „pregnant”, not ” embarrassed”.
Developmental errors: for a long time now researchers in child language development have been aware of the phenomenon of ” over-generalisation”. This is best described as a situation where a child who starts saying ” Daddy goed and they comed”. What seems to be happening is that the child starts to ” over-generalise” a new rule that has been ( subconsciously) learnt, and, as a result, even makes mistakes with things that he or she seemed to have known before. Later, however, it all gets sorted out as the child begins to have a more sophisticated understanding, and he or she goes back to saying ” went” and ” came” while, at the same, handling regular past tense endings.
Foreign language students make the same kind of develpmental errors as well. This accounts for mistakes like * She is more nicer than him where the acquisition of more for comparatives is over-generalised and then mixed up with the rule that the student has learnt – that comparative adjectives are formed with an adjective+ -er. Errors of this kind are part of a natural acquisition process.
When second-language learners make this kind of error, therefore, they are demonstrating part of the natural process of language learning. Developmental errors are part of the students’ interlanguage, that is the version of the language which a learner has at any one stage of development, and which is continually re-shaped as he or she aims towards full mastery.
Especially when responding to errors, teachers should be seen as providing feedback and helping that re-shaping process, rather than telling students off because they are wrong.
Error correction is necessary because we want to help students grow; however, overcorrecting or embarrassing students can do more harm than good. It is essential first to consider the situation before correcting an error. Above all, acknowledging that a message has been understood is more important.
Bibliography:
Edge, Julien 1989, Mistakes and Correction Longman
