Teaching English as a Foreign Language, Second Edition

Errors, Correction and Remedial Work
134
Of course, many courses take care to build in the regular
repetition of lexical and structural material, thereby
reinforcing the original learning and increasing the students’
exposure to it in new contexts. Regular revision of this kind is
a very important means of preventing a serious remedial
situation. Several course books provide periodic revision tests
to make sure that the material thus far presented has been
assimilated. The ‘spiral syllabus’ is another means of ensuring
that good teaching and effective learning achieve the right
results. The idea here is that only one or two aspects of the
present simple are introduced and practised before moving on
to another topic. But the teaching plan comes back round to
the present simple fairly shortly and the original structures are
reinforced, then extended. Similarly with the second topic.
After a while the present simple is reintroduced for the third
time, reinforced and extended. And so on for all the structures,
notions and lexis in the syllabus.
Another important factor which can produce poor
learning and a potential remedial situation is the many
choices of materials to teach from. They must not only be
constructed on sound educational and linguistic principles
but also be suitable for the age groups of the students and
suitable for the part of the world they are to be used in. There
is little point in using a course designed for teens and
twenties who are learning in Europe (with all the
presuppositions this entails of a modern sophisticated life
style in big cities), with an older age group in a developing
country. Many courses are not well suited to the less
developed part of the world for the very reason that they are
culturally bound to Western Europe.
Apart from the syllabus, the materials and the teacher,
another potential source of trouble is the learner himself. Even
with optimal conditions, there will still be room for remedial
work as there is no such thing as perfect learning. Clearly it is
inevitable that learners do make errors. But is this a good or
bad thing? At first sight it appears self-evident that errors are a
very bad thing and signal a breakdown in the teaching and
learning situation. Certainly this was the accepted view for
many years. Behaviourist psychologists in particular
emphasised the importance of massive manipulative practice
of the language, often in a rather mechanical fashion, to

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Errors, Correction and Remedial Work
135
ensure correctness. The drills were structured in such a way
that it was difficult for the student to make many mistakes.
Hence he heard only good models and was encouraged by
producing acceptable English sentences all the time.
More recently, the mentalists have put forward a different
view of errors, which has gained wide acceptance. The
argument in its strong form runs that a learner must make
errors as an unavoidable and necessary part of the learning
process, so errors are not the bad thing once thought but
visible proof that learning is taking place. As the student
learns a new language, very often he does not know how to
express what he wants to say. So he makes a guess on the
basis of his knowledge of his mother tongue and of what he
knows of the foreign language. The process is one of
hypothesis formulation and refinement, as the student
develops a growing competence in the language he is
learning. He moves from ignorance to mastery of the
language through transitional stages, and the errors he
makes are to be seen as a sign that learning is taking place.
Errors will always be made, and have direct implications
for remedial work because they are by their nature
systematic infringements of the normal rules of the language.
The teacher needs to plan his remedial treatment of them
into the syllabus for the coming weeks and months. Quite
different are the minor errors of speech or writing which
everybody makes—native speakers as much as non-natives.
Spoken language, for instance, is punctuated by pauses,
unfinished sentences, slips of the tongue and so on. The
unedited transcript on p. 68 is a good example of this. These
lapses would quickly be put right if pointed out. They call for
on-the-spot correction rather than remedial work.
The insight that errors are a natural and important part of
the learning process itself, and do not all come from mother
tongue interference, is very important. It has long been
known that learners from very diverse linguistic
backgrounds almost universally have difficulty with certain
things, whether they existed or not in their mother tongue.
For instance, nearly all second language learners—like
children learning their mother tongue—produce forms like
‘he musted do it yesterday’, ‘he throwed the ball’, ‘five
womans’, etc., at some stage. The problem here is that they

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