Teaching English as a Foreign Language, Second Edition

Errors, Correction and Remedial Work
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generalise a rule they know (the past tense is formed by
adding -ed; plural forms have an -s at the end) to apply to all
cases. The restrictions on the application of the rule have not
been learnt.
Recent experimental evidence suggests that even in adult
learners where the mother tongue system is deeply
entrenched and transfer errors are at their peak, still only a
minority of errors are attributable to mother tongue
interference. In the case of children, errors attributable solely
to interference represent a tiny percentage of all errors
committed.
It was a widespread belief until recently that contrastive
analysis (comparing the learner’s mother tongue with the
target language) would predict the difficulties a learner
would encounter and so enable the teacher to concentrate on
them and avoid them. Recent findings, plus observation in
the classroom, that all predicted errors did not in fact prove
to be difficulties have led to the conclusion that contrasting
the learner’s mother tongue with English is primarily useful
as an explanatory rather than predictive procedure. It is one
of the possible causes for error which the teacher must
consider, not a basis on which stands all his teaching.
In short, it is clear from this brief discussion that the
learner brings with him one source of error: his mother
tongue. Even more importantly, the learning process itself is
the source of other errors. The most sensible course of
action, with present knowledge, for the teacher is to reject
the extreme positions—on one hand that errors are wrong
and must be avoided at all costs by very carefully controlled
drilling; on the other that incorrect forms are necessary, even
vital, and so should be actively planned into the teaching
process—and attempt to blend the best features from both
approaches into his error correction. The rest of this chapter
suggests some practical procedures for dealing with errors.
The first stage is to establish what the error is. The basic
question to ask is whether what the learner intended to state
is the same as the normal understanding of what he actually
said or wrote. He may have wanted to communicate the idea
that John entered the room, but his actual words were ‘John
came to the room’. This is a superficially well-formed
sentence. It would, however, give the listener a slightly

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Errors, Correction and Remedial Work
137
different impression than the speaker intended, since to come
to somewhere need not necessarily imply that the person
actually entered. He may, but he may not. The speaker’s
intention was to convey the meaning that the person actually
entered the room. The imprecise use of prepositions,
although giving a plausible interpretation, caused the
speaker to misrepresent his actual meaning. Very often the
teacher in a case like this senses something is wrong. It is of
course much easier where there is a clearly erroneous
sentence such as ‘John entered into the room’. In either
circumstance, the teacher can ask questions directly in an
attempt to discover the learner’s original intention. Also
there are elicitation techniques available (translation, or
multiple-choice tests, for example) to enable the teacher to
isolate more exactly the specific error.
The second stage is to establish the possible sources of the
error, to explain why it happened. It is important to do this as
a full knowledge of the causes of an error enables the teacher
to work out a more effective teaching strategy to deal with it.
The main reasons for error were given earlier in this chapter:
poor materials, bad teaching, errors from the learning
process, and mother tongue interference. The last two
factors are of most immediate practical use, since it is
extremely difficult to identify errors which are solely
attributable to the teaching and materials. If a French adult,
for instance, said ‘John entered into the room’, it would be
sensible to consider first the possibility of interference from
‘Jean est entré dans la salle’.
It is not enough simply to have located the error and
analysed its cause. The third step is to decide how serious the
mistake is. The more serious the mistake, generally speaking,
the higher priority it should have in remedial work. An
obvious approach is to look at the error in linguistic terms
and see what rules are broken. As a general principle, errors
in the overall structure of sentences are more important than
errors affecting parts of sentences, though there is no general
agreement about a scale of error gravity. As a rough guide it
has recently been suggested that the error-types considered
most serious are: transformations, tense, concord, case,
negation, articles, order, lexical errors.
There is the further possibility of looking at a mistake in

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