Teaching Skills Input Session 9: Error Correction (Types of Errors)
What’s Your Attitude to Mistakes?
When people are learning a language, they never get it right first time!
It’s a normal part of learning a first, or any other, language.
Native speakers make mistakes too, especially in informal conversations.
Why Do Learners Make Mistakes?
Developmental Errors
Developmental errors are a natural part of language learning & similar to a child learning their mother tongue.
Over-Generalization
Over-generalisation is over-applying the rules (e.g. I goed/comed/runned, etc. he must to go). This is also common in kids learning their mother tongue.
Interference Errors
L1 interference is the influence of the mother tongue (consciously or unconsciously) on the second language.
Interlanguage
Interlanguage is the student’s own version of the language they’re learning at a certain stage in language development.
Fossilised Errors
Fossilised errors happen when mistakes go uncorrected for too long and/or the learner is unaware of them (this makes them more difficult to “fix”).
What Kind of Mistakes Do Students Make?
S.E.A.
Slips
A slip happens as a result of tiredness, speed or carelessness, the learner knows how to say it correctly but it comes out wrong.
Errors
An error happens when the learner either doesn’t know, has learnt something incorrectly/misunderstood, or as a result of interference/developmental factors.
Attempts
An attempt is something beyond the learner’s language knowledge, they are trying something difficult/unknown/unseen and perhaps make a mess of it!
Classifying Mistakes
Mistakes can be classified into two broad categories:
A. Productive (spoken or written))
B. Receptive (faulty understanding)
These can be broken down into 4 sub-categories:
Grammatical
e.g. word order, omission of articles, addition of extra words
Lexical
e.g. incorrect choice of word, wrong word in a collocation, “inventing” a word, transferring a word from L1, distortion of words (chicken-kitchen)
Phonological
e.g. due to L1 interference
Semantic
e.g. word formation (cooker-cook), misuse of gramatical categories (interesting-interested), level of formality, unintended connotation
Do Mistakes Matter?
Discuss how much these different types of mistakes matter.
Which are most likely to lead to a breakdown in communication?
Error Correction (Types of Errors): Task 1
Watch this video clip of methodology author and general TEFL expert, Jeremy Harmer, discussing errors, and consider the following questions:
- Should errors be corrected?
- If so, when should errors be corrected?
- Which errors should be corrected?
- How should errors be corrected?
- Who should correct errors?
Hendrickson (1978)
