MISTAKE OR ERROR
In some cases, teachers may not decide to treat an error because the difference between errors and mistakes are not always clear. James (1998:79) makes a useful distinction and says:
'Errors, one must assume, are everything that mistakes are not; they are of significance ;they do not reflect knowledge; they are not self-correctable; and only learners of L2 make them.'
HOW TO CORRECT ERRORS
And how to correct errors depends largely on the context. Whether to correct errors or not depends on the kind of learners and the linguistic level of students, as Tsui (1995:48) puts it:
‘For students with low language proficiency it would be unreasonable to expect error- free sentences. For students who are very shy and reticent it is more important to get them to express themselves rather than produce correct forms.’
According to James (1998:236) the term correction is used in three senses:
· Informing the learner that there is an error and leaving them to discover and repair it themselves. This is called feedback.
· Providing treatment or information that leads to the revision and correction of the specific instance of error (error token)without aiming to prevent the error from reoccurring later.
· Providing learners with information that allows them to revise or reject the wrong rule they were operating with when they produced the error token. Since its purpose is primarily to improve the processes for all future productions rather than merely ‘cosmetically’ to improve the present product, this is called remediation.’
In the classroom, students may sometimes try to form sentences which have just been introduced to them or try to utter sentences which have not been covered in the classroom and make mistakes or errors. In situations like these it may be time consuming and also not useful to give any sorts of feedback as it may not make any sense to the learner, as Allwright and Bailey (1991:102) suggests:
‘Another question which teachers face in deciding whether to treat an error or to ignore it is whether the error is within the learner’s grasp in terms of his or her place on the interlaguage continuum. It may do no good at all to try to give learners feedback on a form they are not ready to learn.’
I believe how to correct the errors of performance is important because students need to be encouraged to speak without being defensive and thinking about assessment. Norrish (1983:116) states about the correction of speech errors:
' ...when the learner is more concerned with expressing a meaning, importing some information or opinion, that he is with the forms of language he is using for that purpose, he should not be stopped or corrected in 'mid-stream'
A teacher might consider an utterance an error whereas another teacher may accept the utterance as Norrish (1983:91) states:
'There may be times when one judge or teacher will consider a given form an error, while another would consider it acceptable. Since language constantly changes and develops, what is considered 'incorrect' today may be acceptable tomorrow.'
The best example of it is I guess:
TEACHER'S PERCEPTION IS IMPORTANT
Another related issue is that it may be more significant from a teacher's perception to expect the correct answers for a particular exercise or an activity even when it may be a suitable utterance in the target language as Tsui (1995:43) comments:
'An error in the classroom is commonly understood as something that is rejected by the teacher because it is wrong and inappropiate. However, when classroom exchanges are examined it is found that what teachers consider being errors may not be wrong or inappropiate at all.'
Thank you Susan from Karatay University for giving me the idea to think and write about this issue.
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