The English-Learning and Languages Review Æ Homepage
Mistakes and
Correcting
Amorey Gethin
This web page is an edited extract
from The Art and Science of Learning Languages, by Amorey Gethin and Erik
V. Gunnemark, published by Intellect in 1996 http://www.intellectbooks.com
3 The importance of mistakes varies according to your
purpose
5 The problem is remembering the problem
6 Make a note of your 'favourite' mistakes
7 Can one avoid making mistakes even if one does not have
a teacher or guide to help?
8 Being corrected when you speak
9 Being corrected when you write
10 Choosing the right person to correct your mistakes
11 How much should a corrector correct?
12 How conscientious is the correcting?
13 Correcting mistakes is very boring
14 Possible correcting methods: by private teacher
15 Corrections need in the end to be in your head, not on
pieces of paper!
16 Possible correcting methods: by computer
Many writers on
the subject of learning foreign languages will tell you that you should not
worry about making mistakes. This is always right if they mean that you should
never feel you have committed some terrible crime, or are a very stupid person,
if you make mistakes. But in all other ways it depends on what you are trying
to do.
If you only want to use your foreign language for practical purposes, such
as travelling, it will normally not matter much even
if you make a lot of mistakes. It may not matter even if you use a foreign
language in your daily work, though that will depend very much on what sort of
work you do. But simple mistakes can of course cause difficulties even for travellers.
I have had personal experience of this: My wife and I once had to stay
overnight in a little place in the Swiss Alps when we discovered there were no
more trains going anywhere that day. That was all simply because earlier in the
day I had asked someone a question in my limited German, which I had not practised for many years, and had said already – schon - when I really meant soon – bald.
(We also discovered it was a lovely place to be stranded in, but that is another
story.)
Again, and much more recently, I was talking to a restaurant owner in a
troubled part of the world who I knew had lost his restaurant in another town
in the region and had had to start up again from scratch. So I was dismayed
when he then told me that he would have to "move out" soon. It was
some time before I realized he meant that he was preparing to move outside for
the summer season.
However, when people advise you not to worry about mistakes they are
probably thinking above all of grammar. The examples given in the section above
were simply of people choosing the wrong word. For travelling
and work, mistakes in grammar do not usually matter much, but even grammar
mistakes can have serious results. If my German grammar had been better on the
Swiss railway I would probably not have been misunderstood, in spite of my
mistake in vocabulary. My wife, whose native language has neither articles nor
plurals, caused confusion on one occasion by talking about the whole meal,
when she really meant wholemeal (as in wholemeal bread), and on another, festive, occasion by
announcing she was giving some flour - rather than flowers - to
an elderly friend. "What on earth for?!" people asked. In the first
case she used the article when she should not have, although more often, of
course, people with languages without articles leave them out when they should
put them in. But the point is that in any case there may be misunderstandings
if a person has not mastered the grammar.
3 The importance of mistakes varies according to your purpose
However, in spite of the
possibilities of misunderstandings arising from mistakes, it is worth repeating
that for many people, perhaps even the majority, it does not as a rule really
matter if they often make mistakes, and they are nothing to be ashamed of. One
cannot emphasize too often that the question of whether mistakes matter, like
so much else in the study of a foreign language, depends both on what you want
it for, and on your personal ambitions in it. If you are keen to achieve a high
standard in the language you plan to study, to speak it correctly as well as
fluently, perhaps even perfectly or near perfectly, then mistakes obviously
matter very much indeed.
The
real problem with mistakes is psychological. Usually when people say mistakes
do not matter they mean, most of all, that making mistakes does not stop you
learning well. You will learn, they tell you, through your mistakes.
Unfortunately, for most people, this is not true. In
real life it doesn't work like that. I have corrected the English, in writing
or speech, of thousands of students from many different parts of the world, at
levels of English varying from that of beginners to advanced.
Sadly, almost none of all those students learned effectively from their
mistakes. A great many went on constantly making the same mistakes, however
many times they were corrected; a very large proportion of students will make
exactly the same mistake again within half a minute of being corrected, if they
have the opportunity. Even those who do in the end stop repeating their
mistakes very often need to make the same error some thirty, forty or fifty
times before they finally put it right. This is obviously a very inefficient as
well as frustrating way of working - it cannot be a satisfactory way of trying
to learn!
The problem is again a problem of attitude. Believing
you will learn from your mistakes is one of the ways of relying on others
instead of on yourself which are so harmful; it is one of those ways of
expecting others to do the work, when you should be doing it yourself. That
making mistakes does not matter is a strange idea if one thinks about it
logically and realistically. It is a very negative approach and must mean that
the student will take a careless attitude to studying the language.
If you want to master the language really well and
quickly, your attitude should instead be, from the very beginning, that you are
determined not to make mistakes. You will of course almost certainly make some
mistakes all the same, and when you do you should naturally not be miserable
about it. Above all, though, you must not give up your determination not to
make mistakes. If you keep up your determination, there will be two good
results: you will in fact make very few mistakes; and when you do make mistakes
you will be able to stop making those particular mistakes very soon.
When you are determined not to make mistakes you will think
before you write or speak. Then, if you are not certain exactly what you
ought to say to express your ideas, you will find out what the right
thing to write or say is. In this way you will learn a great deal about the
language, and much more quickly than if you don't mind about mistakes. As you
get better at the language in this way, you will find you no longer need to
think about the points you were not sure about before. You will get them right
automatically.
5 The problem is remembering the problem
But if you do not care about making mistakes, you will
miss or take a much longer time to get hold of most of the knowledge that the
inquisitive finding-out approach would give you. And even if you finally have
the knowledge, you will very probably go on repeating some mistakes
nevertheless. I know non-native-English-speaking university teachers and
professors of English who know practically all that it is important to
know about the grammar of English, but who make the same one or two grammar
mistakes again and again and again. If one pointed the mistake out to them,
they would probably say, "How terrible!", and be very shocked at
themselves, because they know about that particular point of grammar very well.
What is happening is this: They have not forgotten the correct grammar. They
have forgotten about the problem connected with that particular part of
the grammar.
Apart from
simply not remembering, or forgetting to remind themselves of the correct
language, the most common sort of mistake that people make is to translate the
grammar or vocabulary of their own language directly into the foreign language.
They tend to assume that the foreign language works the same way as their own.
Whenever you are not sure how something is expressed in the foreign language,
it is a very good principle to assume that the foreign language does it in a
different way from your own. It does not matter if you find out that the two
languages do in fact work the same way. Whether they work the same way or not,
you have thought about a problem and found something out.
So where
mistakes are concerned there is a very practical truth that you should always
keep in mind. Most people believe that the biggest problem, at least in
grammar, is remembering rules, remembering the answers to grammatical
questions. In practice this is not so. We can express the real situation by a
sort of slogan or maxim:
Remembering the
answer to the problem is not the problem. The problem is remembering the
problem.
6 Make a note of your 'favourite'
mistakes (note 1)
If my university
teacher friends would only remember that, they would very soon stop
repeating their 'favourite' mistakes. When you make a mistake it does not in
practice help to say, "How bad! I must study the grammar or usage again
and learn it by heart." Or, if you have made mistakes in a composition you
have written, it will not help much just to go through it with a teacher and
have the mistakes pointed out to you (or what is far more likely to happen,
have the teacher more or less conscientiously correct your composition at home
by himself and hand it back to you). You must of course know what mistakes you
have made, and you must understand them. But that is only the beginning. It
does not matter at all, at this stage, if you cannot remember the exact grammar
or usage. The essential thing is to make a note in some way of the
problem, even if it is only a mental note. In note 2 there is an imaginary example of what a personal list might be for
students of English as a foreign language.
But make sure you keep the problems in mind. Whenever you arrive at one
of them, decide whether you know the answer to the problem or not. If you know
the answer, fine. But don't think you will always get that point right in
future. You only got it right this time because you remembered that there was
a problem for you there. You will almost certainly get it wrong next time
if you do not remember the problem next time.
If you decide you do not know the answer to the problem, you find out
what the answer is. You can look it up in a book, or in your notes if you have
made any about it, or in your earlier writings in the language; or, if you are
talking to a native speaker, you can ask. If you do this every time you come to
one of your problems, you will very quickly learn the right grammar or usage
without having to do the nasty boring work of learning it by heart;
furthermore, you will learn it really deeply, and finally the correct language
will become part of you, and you will get it right every time without thinking
about it.
You should use the same methods, of course, for the mistakes that you do
continue to make. If you follow this advice really systematically you will
almost certainly find that you learn much more quickly.
Except when you are preparing for an exam - and assuming you are the
sort of person who likes to make written notes - organize your mistakes and
their corrections in a looseleaf notebook. (Never
write on the back of the page unless it is about the same subject as on the front.)
You should put in here everything that you find particularly difficult in the
way of grammar, choice of words, spelling etc. If you go through this
collection of special points from time to time, and particularly when you are
about to do a new piece of writing, you will avoid repeating your mistakes.
(Many people prefer these days to use computers or word processors for storing
their notes.)
7 Can one avoid making
mistakes even if one does not have a teacher or guide to help?
Can one avoid making mistakes even if one does not have a teacher or
guide to help one? We think the answer is "yes", although it is more
difficult; or at least one can avoid making many mistakes. The secret is to be
very careful to do what has already been recommended: always assume, if you are
not certain you already know what to say, that the foreign language works
differently from your own. As always, if you don't know how, find out!
8 Being corrected when you
speak
Students of foreign
languages sometimes complain that teachers or others do not correct them when
they speak and make mistakes. If the people who do not correct you are native
speakers but not teachers, try to be understanding. They may have very
honourable or practical reasons for not correcting you. They may feel it is
rude to do so, or that it would be arrogant to take your teacher's place. Or
they may feel - very often rightly, perhaps - that it would break up the
conversation too much. On the whole it is probably better not to ask people to
correct you, unless of course you know them very well. Otherwise you can never
be sure that you will not embarrass them in some way. (Asking people questions
about their language is quite another matter.)
Moreover,
the same arguments apply that I put forward in §4.
Most students, unfortunately, including those who ask to be corrected, take
little or no notice of the corrections. Once more the tendency is to rely too
much on other people, instead of doing the work themselves. Experience shows
that most of the people who really do learn from being corrected are the sort
of people who make very few mistakes in the first place, and who ask
beforehand "Is it right to say it like this?" or "How should
I say that?" In other words, they are aware of the problems in advance.
They know when they don't know.
As a
teacher I have always conscientiously corrected the mistakes that students have
made in speaking. But it has always been a rather depressing process for me, as
I know that probably well over ninety per cent of them will make exactly the
same mistake the next time they get the chance. I am really happy to correct
students only when I know they are the sort of people who are constantly asking
their teachers questions.
9 Being corrected when you
write
Correction
of your written language is a completely different matter. You should
always try to get this done. It should be for most people the most efficient
way of finding out for certain whether they are using the foreign language
accurately and naturally. The best person to do the correcting is a native
speaker who is also a teacher; unfortunately it is of course very often not
possible to find such a person.
10 Choosing the right person
to correct your mistakes
You
can naturally always ask people who are not teachers to correct your writing
for you. But you should be on your guard. However kind and intelligent and
well-educated people may be, they can make statements
about their own language that are not true. It may seem strange that this is
so. But it often happens, sometimes because they have not thought consciously
about how their language works, and sometimes because they have unrealistic
ideas about language, and think one ought to speak or write in a certain
way which is not the way they actually speak or write themselves, and may not
be the way other native speakers speak in practice either.
11 How much should a
corrector correct?
How
much should a corrector correct? In my opinion, everything that is the
slightest wrong or unidiomatic should be corrected down to the smallest detail.
One can hear the argument "At this stage it is
not necessary to correct that and that sort of mistake. It will only confuse
the student if you correct too much. It is better to get the basics right
first. Then we can deal with the more difficult stuff later."
The trouble with this approach is that what is
considered unimportant at one stage becomes important at the next stage, and absolutely essential at the stage after that. Yet
on the way the student has been allowed to get into the habit of writing
what is wrong, while believing the whole time that it is right. Correctors who
only correct some mistakes are deceiving students, unless they tell them what
they are doing. I would be extremely worried if my corrector told me that some
of my mistakes were not being corrected. I would start wondering the whole time
whether what I had written was right or wrong; I would not be able to forget
that what one person would consider important another might not; and I would
ask myself how much language I was continually using incorrectly that I would
later find it very difficult to start using correctly.
12 How conscientious is the
correcting?
There
is another problem connected with correcting. Not all correctors correct
equally conscientiously. This is a very difficult problem, and before one
condemns the more careless correctors, one should consider the reasons there
may be for their carelessness.
They may, of course, simply be lazy or ignorant, or
both. There is no excuse for this, but unfortunately there are some teachers of
this sort around, and it is not always easy for their students to spot them.
People who are lazy, or don't know enough about the language, or about how to
correct, should never take on correcting work for a foreign-language student.
Good correctors not only put right what is wrong. They also explain how and
why it is wrong. There is obviously little point in making a correction if
it does not show what to do the next time the student wants to express a
similar idea. This often involves a great deal of work. Very often teachers
just do not have enough time to do complete corrections. They may react to this
situation by not asking their students to practise writing as much as they
should. Or they only correct what they consider the worst mistakes. Or they
correct everything that is wrong, but give few explanations,
or none at all.
I have myself always been a conscientious corrector.
After a year or two of experience I was able to correct students' writing much
more quickly than when I started, because I did not have to think so much about
how to explain the mistakes. Even so, I don't think I was ever able to correct
in an hour more than five 150-word compositions by middle-stage students of
English. Very often the work was far slower than that. (The writing of more
advanced students tends to be quicker to correct. On the other hand such
students tend to write more, and sometimes their language needs longer
explanations.)
I was only able to correct as thoroughly as I did
because I was nearly always lucky and privileged. The classes for whose
compositions I was responsible seldom contained more than fifteen students,
often fewer, and I was seldom responsible for more than two such classes at the
same time. Nevertheless, there were other things written by the students to
attend to, so even at the best of times I had many hours of concentrated
homework.
My own personal experience, as well as what I have
heard, suggests to me that most foreign-language teachers are not as lucky as I
have been. Many of them do not have enlightened employers, or are unable to
enjoy the comparative luxury of free-lance work. Their employers demand from
them far too many hours of teaching of too many students in an ever larger
world-wide industry (at least as regards English) that often puts commerce and
image before true effectiveness and service. If these teachers did their
correcting properly, one would only be able to describe their work as
sweated-labour, and they would have practically no leisure at all.
13 Correcting mistakes is very boring
There is one other important reason why corrections
are sometimes not done properly. They are horribly boring to do.
Every student
is, like everyone else, a unique human being, and so students are constantly
interesting to any teacher who is interested in people. Unfortunately students'
mistakes are not at all unique. Most of them are depressingly the same. (With a
little experience one can work out the nationality of students from the
mistakes they make, even if you didn't know it before!) You can imagine how
soul-destroying it must be to have to deal with exactly the same problems,
write exactly the same sort of explanation, over and over again for twenty
years or more. I no longer do any teaching, and often greatly miss it. But
there are just two things I am very glad to have escaped: getting up every day
knowing I have to go off to follow a strict timetable; and that terrible
correcting, the interminable tedium of the hours spent in solitude dealing with
students' mistakes.
There are in
principle two solutions to the problem. One is already a practical solution for
some people, but not for all; the other is unfortunately only a future and
perhaps uncertain possibility, not a present one.
14 Possible correcting
methods: by private teacher
Of the ways to
have your written work corrected that are possible at the moment, easily the
best is to get a teacher to go through it with you in private sessions. This is
the best method from every point of view. If you do not at once fully
understand a mistake or your teacher's explanation, you can immediately ask any
questions you like, and your teacher should be able to answer immediately in a
way that is just right for you personally. Most competent teachers will greatly
prefer this method. They do not have to spend long hours alone doing boring
writing work, they can make sure that the student is thinking seriously about
the problem, that their correcting is really effective, and they can enjoy the
student's company in the process.
15 Corrections need in the
end to be in your head, not on pieces of paper!
Different people
like to study in different ways, but a method I have often suggested to private
students is that they should not write down the correction of a mistake
during the session when they discuss it. Instead, I asked them to write it
later, perhaps the next day. In this way they may make themselves concentrate
more efficiently. Very often people who always write the 'answer' down do not
take enough trouble to put it firmly into their heads; they have the feeling -
conscious or unconscious - that everything is fine, because the information is
nice and safe on paper. This is often a bad mistake. In the end language
knowledge is only useful in your head, not on a piece of paper.
16 Possible correcting
methods: by computer
One day, we can
hope, most of the work, or at any rate all the routine repetitive work, of
correcting can be taken over by computers. This would almost certainly
encourage language students to become more responsible for their mistakes. At
the same time it would free teachers from the most tedious part of their work
and allow them to concentrate on the most important tasks of all: showing
students how to learn for themselves, and answering their questions.
More than half the mistakes language students make are
usually predictable, and so presumably a computer system is, in principle at
least, ideal for picking them up. It would presumably be a good
deal more difficult for the system to explain the mistake in each unique
context, but let us hope that too will eventually be possible. (note 3)
However, such a
wonderful labour- and tedium-saving device would make matters worse, not
better, if it performed its correcting work in the same way as unfortunately
most conscientious language teachers still do today, unless we are mistaken.
Most students do not benefit by having each mistake they make immediately
pointed out and explained to them. They tend to make exactly the same mistake
again the next time the opportunity arises, or if not next time, four weeks
hence. As I have pointed out, the most important truth to be recognised about all grammatical problems, and a great many
problems of word use as well, is that the real problem is remembering the
problem.
Computers surely
offer a marvellous opportunity for providing a system of correction which is
truly effective, but which human teachers of classes would in practice never
have the time to apply. Such a system would work something like this:
Let us take the
use of the past and present perfect tenses in English as an illustration. The
system might, the first time it caught the student making a mistake with these
tenses, tell him:
"You have
made a past/present perfect tense mistake in line x."
If the student
did not immediately understand by himself how he had gone wrong, he would still
have to find out for himself, preferably from the system's own store of grammar
explanations. It could presumably be arranged that the system would not respond
to any question "What is wrong with this particular sentence of
mine?" until the student had consulted the general grammar.
In the next
composition (say) in which the student made the same mistake, the system would
reveal only that there was a tense mistake (not what sort of tense mistake) in
line x.
The next time it
might draw attention to a tense mistake in paragraph x; then to a
mistake (unspecified) in line x; and finally merely to a mistake in paragraph
x.
At each
successive stage the restrictions preventing the student obtaining a direct
answer to any question about what was wrong would be increased. It is not
difficult for the student to work in this way, because he is continually being
reminded what his own particular problem is - and being made to remind himself.
The system
should go an essential step further by mentally jogging the student's elbow as
he writes material in the first place.
"You are
using 'suggest' - bleep! - what happened last time you
used that word? How is it used in English?'
The student
should be able to disarm the bleep by indicating in advance that he was aware
of the problem.
The sort of
procedure just described is one important way in which one can apply the
fundamental principle we have continually emphasized earlier - that language
students should think of and do things for tliemselves. It also trains
the student to direct his attention to the area where it is needed at
any given moment, in contrast to the 'course' approach.
1. There is a school of
thought which says that students of foreign languages should never
be encouraged to commit to paper anything that is wrong, on the grounds that
they are inviting themselves to remember what is incorrect rather than what is
correct. This is to be wholly unrealistic. The vast majority of language
students will anyway make what one might call 'classic' mistakes, as well as
their own personal mistakes, even if they do not write any notes at all. Once
more we have to come back to the reality that the greatest problem is
remembering the problem. It is pure practical sense to remind oneself of the
dangers.
Past/Present Perfect
NOT "do something for doing" (purpose)
NOT "the nature, the life"
since: NOT "since three
weeks"
NOT "suggest somebody to do"
word order: NOT "I eat seldom eggs"
if: NOT "if I would"
NOT "by his car"
NOT "bigger as"
NOT "a so beautiful country"
Keep a count of how many times you make the same
mistake!
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