- What is an error?
Errors
are of two types:
- forms that are not acceptable according to the rules (syntactic, phonological, lexical) of the target language.
- forms that are themselves acceptable but which are used in a way that is unacceptable (e.g. errors of style).
- It is worth making a distinction between errors/slips/lapses. Slips of the tongue are often spontaneously corrected by the speaker; lapses caused by tiredness, or inattention can also be corrected by the speaker if attention is drawn to them.
- It has now become clear that many of the errors of a second/foreign language-learner are developmental: that is, they are a natural part of the learning process, in the same way that the incorrect utterances of a child learning its native language are seen as natural part of its linguistic development.
- What causes errors?
There
are four main causes of error. Two of these are inevitable; the other
two are to some degree avoidable.
- errors as indicators of the present state of knowledge: teacher should be prepared to accept these errors for what they are, and not as evidence of a poor memory or unsuccessful teaching.
- Errors as a result of overgeneralization or false analogy on the basis of too little linguistic evidence. If language-learning proceeds in a sequence (Data>Hypothesis 1> More Data> Feedback> Hypothesis2> More Data> etc.) then correction can function positively, to assist learning.
- Errors as a result of negative transfer (interference) from the learner’s mother tongue. Correction is not always effective in this case.
- Errors as a result of wrong hypothesis caused by poor teaching. Here correction is a poor substitute for re-teaching.
- Are most frequent also most serious errors?
Grammatical
errors (prepositions, word order, selectional restrictions after a
particular verb, etc.), although extremely resistant to change,
interfere with communication to a relatively small extent.
Phonological errors are
a much more serious problem since they are a potential source of
irritation to native speakers, while lexical
errors can lead to a complete breakdown in
communication.
- Teachers must make decisions about what, when, and how to correct and make remedial intervention.
WHAT
we correct will depend partly on whether we consider correction will
serve any purpose, and partly on what we consider important during a
particular activity.
WHEN
goes both for the teacher and the student(s) who is/are expected to
correct himself/each other. Don’t mix up fluency activities with
accuracy activities, when correction is important.
NB:
Teachers must find ways of encouraging students to monitor and
correct, when appropriate, both their own production and (in a spirit
of helpfulness) that of their fellow-learners.
- CLASSROOM OBSERVATION: ERROR CORRECTION
- Note the type of mistakes – e.g. Pronunciation, grammar, vocabulary
- How was the correction achieved? – e.g. Student guided to self-correction, student to student correction or teacher to student correction.
- Note when the teacher corrected, e.g. on the spot or delayed…
- Did the teacher anticipate any mistakes? E.g. pronunciation/grammar?
- Did the teacher hear mistakes?
- Did the teacher correct too much or too little?
- Was the teacher right in their correction?
- Did the teacher jot down mistakes?
- Comment on the overall success of the correction taking place.
- Reflection as Exercise
- There are different schools of thought on how or even whether to correct during a fluency or communicative activity. Where do you stand, with those advocating the necessity of correction or those disfavouring correction altogether?
- When should correction be more persistent: at lower levels or high levels, according to you?
- Mario Rinvolucri advocates ‘hot correction’ (slip of paper with the correction on it, immediately handed in to the student) in group work. Would you consider the method disruptive or decently protective to the student?
- Do you consider recording the activity, using video or sound tape, and playing it back to the students a valuable source of working on the language?
- It is said that the greatest irritants to native speakers are not grammar or morphology errors (the first obsession of classical Error Analysis), but what Thomson (1983) called ‘pragmatic failures’, which mainly occur due to native language transfers. Provide at least one example.
- It is well known the native speakers’ tolerance towards errors. How do you explain that there is always a tendency for deprecatory assessment with the non-native foreign language teacher?
- Chomsky (1981) refers to feedback given to infants acquiring the NL as positive v. negative ‘evidence’. What was he referring to more exactly?
- The idea that learners produce forms which, even if corrected, are not quite what the native would say is developed by Levenston (1978). He shows that an EA that limits itself to reconstruction, i.e. on putting the grammar right, is flawed: what is left will still display lexical inadequacy, syntactic blends, conceptual confusion and rhetorical ineptitude. We could say that what learners write may well be discourse ‘in English’ but still falls short of being ‘English discourse’. Thus the attention, nowadays, has shifted from clear-cut error to the vaguer notion of infelicity. So, where do you stand among learners/teachers: those who perform correctly but ‘infelicitously’ or those who have the feeling of the language?