Making mistakes plays an important and useful part in language learning because it allows learners to experiment with language and measure their success in communicating. Mistakes are often categorised into errors and slips. Errors occur when learners try to say something that is beyond their current level of knowledge or language processing. Usually, because they are still processing or don’t know this part of the language, learners cannot correct errors themselves because they don’t understand what is wrong.
Slips are the result of tiredness, worry or other temporary emotions or circumstances. We make them because we are not concentrating on what we are saying and writing. They are not a result of incomplete language processing or a lack of knowledge. They happen simply because our attention is somewhere else at that moment. These kind of mistakes can be corrected by learners themselves, once they realise they have made them.
There are two main reasons why second language learners make errors. The first reason is influence from the learner’s first language (mother tongue/L1) on the second language (L2). This is called interference or transfer. Learners may use sound patterns, lexis or grammatical structures from their own language in English.
The second reason why learners make errors is because they are unconsciously working out, organising and experimenting with language they have learnt, but this process is not yet complete. This kind of error is called developmental error. These errors are common to all learners, whatever their L1, and are often similar to those made by a young first language speaker as part of their normal language development. Common developmental errors in English are using the past tense for the present perfect tense or making mistakes with past verb forms. For exemple, very young first language speakers of English as well as English language learners often say “I goed” instead of “I went”. Errors such as this one, in which learners wrongly apply a rule for one item of the language to another item, are the result of overgeneralisation (applying a rule too widely). Once children develop their L1 language abilities, these errors disappear, and as a second language learner’s language ability increases, these errors often disappear, too.
Errors play a necessary and important part in language learning. They are part of learner’s interlanguage, that is the learner’s own version of the second language which they speak as they learn. Learners unconsciously process, analysing and reorganising their interlanguage. Interlanguage is not fixed. It develops and progresses as learners learn more. Experts think that interlanguage is an essential and unavoidable stage in language learning. L1 learners go through a stage similar to the interlanguage stage: when children learn their mother tongue they seem to speak their own version of it for a while, to make progress on some language items, then to ga backwards, and to make mistakes for a time before these mistakes finally disappear, usually without obvious correction.
Errors are a natural part of learning. They usually show that learners are learning and that their internal mental processes are working on and experimenting with language. By making mistakes you realise that you don’t know something and you try to put it right. As we communicate with others and see that our communication isn’t working, we try again, using other words ar aiming for greater accuracy. Learners go through stages of learning new language, and each new piece of language they learn helps them learn more fully other pieces of language that they already know – like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle which only make full sense when they are all in place.
Developmental and interference errors can disappear by themselves, without correction, as the learner learns more language. Experts say that correction may only help learners if they are at the right stage in their individual learning process, or interlanguage. There are three main ways of helping learners develop their language. Firstly, the learners need exposure to lots of interesting language at the right level. Secondly, they need to use language to interact, and thirdly, they need to focus their attention on language forms. Exposing them to lots of language that is just beyond their level of linguistic ability through reading or listening. This provides an unconscious challenge to learner’s language learning processes and helps fit the pieces of the jigsaw into place. Giving the learners opportunities to focus on the form of language through exercises, reformulation or correction. It is also very important to provide them with time in class to use language to communicate and interact and see if they can do so successfully.
Sometimes errors do not disappear, but get fossilised. Fossilised errors are errors which a learner does not stop making and which last for a long time, even for ever, in his/her foreign language use. Fossilisation of errors often happens when learners, particularly adults, are able to communicate as much as they need to in the foreign language and so have no communicative reason to improve their language. These fossilised errors may be the result of lack of exposure to the L2, the result of a learner’s conscious or unconscious lack of motivation to improve their level of accuracy, or the fact that they cause no problem in communication.
Errors are useful not only to the learner but also to the teacher. They can help the teacher see how well learners have learnt something and what kind of help they may need in future. Errors can show that a learner is making progress and learning.
Bibliography
• Mary Spratt, Alan Pulverness, Melanie Williams, The Teaching Knowledge Test Course, Second edition, Cambridge University Press, 2011
• Jeremy Harmer, Essential Teacher Knowledge, Pearson Education Limited, 2012
• Jeremy Harmer, The Practice of English Language Teaching, Longman 2007
• Jim Scrivener, Learning Teaching, Second Edition, Macmillan, 2005