Errors; Attitudes and Principles

·         Two different apchs: 1. sign of failure on student/teacher’s part 2. essential part of learning

1.      Inhibition:       defensive learning (hesitation/fear of making mistakes and being laughed at—learner relegates actual message and focuses on the correct form of his utterance)

Language Teaching Methodology: if 2^nd Lang learning is similar to 1^st Lang learning, then why is it much more difficult? May be because of the teaching methodology

ü  Aims:  Most teachers aim at perfection, but language is not a set of facts that can be perfectly learnt without making mistakes unlike geography, physics, etc. Fluency is as important as knowing the correct forms and teachers should help students get fluent in whatever limited amount of knowledge they have instead of imposing burden of new words overnight

ü  Correcting Errors:   Correcting mistakes later and not interrupting the flow of an activity is recommended in language teaching so that the students don’t become over-aware of their mistakes

ü  What Lang to teach:    Teachers desire to teach the best Lang (e.g. telling students not to use contraction—cant, won’t, etc). This shouldn’t be done because native speakers do use them and the student will get confused. Instead, teacher’s aim should be to teach the words and their different uses in different contexts. Inappropriate forms are as wrong as unacceptable ones (no one variety of Lang is best—it is wrong to teach that formal Lang is the best since “good morning” and “hi” cannot normally be substituted for each other in their respective contexts)

ü  Classroom Activities:    Role-plays are the best ways to teach different uses of the same word. Physical prep (furniture, etc) and linguistic prep (providing relevant vocab) are necessary

2.      1^st Lang Acquisition:    children making guesses (“goed” instead of “went”). Similarly, language learners make “informed guesses” based on their knowledge of the Lang

Types of Errors:

ü  Error (systematic deviation); Mistake (inconsistent deviation); Lapse (“cheiving to astrive” instead of “striving to achieve”—due to fatigue, lack of concentration, etc); Slip (“thats mean”—carelessness in fluency)