The ministry of higher and secondary specialised education of uzbekistan the uzbek state world languages university the english teaching methodology department

Interference from the learners’ own language is not the only reason for making mistakes. There is a category which a number of people call “developmental” errors. These are the result of conscious or subconscious processing which frequently overgeneralises a rule, as for example, when a learner, having learnt to say things like “I have to go”, then starts saying “I must to go”, not realizing that the use of “to” is not permitted with “must”.
Some mistakes are deep-seated and need constant attention (-s in Present Simple). While these are examples of “errors”, others seem to be more like “slips” made while students are simultaneously processing information and they are therefore easier to correct quickly.
Whatever the reason for “getting it wrong”, it is vital for the teacher to realize that all students make mistakes as a natural and useful way of learning. By working out when and why things have gone wrong, they learn more about the language they are studying.
Correction helps students to clarify their understanding of the meaning and construction of language. It is vital part of the teacher’s role, and something which the teacher is uniquely able to provide, but precisely because it involves pointing out people’s mistakes, we have to be careful when correcting since, if we do it in an intensive way, we can upset our students and dent their confidence. What is appropriate for one student, may be quite wrong for another one.
In general, the teacher’s job is to point out when something has gone wrong – and see if the student can correct herself or himself. Maybe what they said or wrote was just a slip and they are able to put it right straightaway.
Sometimes, however, students cannot put mistakes right on their own, so we have to help them. We can do this by asking if one of their colleagues can help out or by explaining the problem ourselves.
If we get other students in the class to help out, we have to make sure that the student who is being corrected is not going to be humiliated by this. Sometimes, students like that prefer gentle correction from the teacher. On the other hand, in the right kind of atmosphere students enjoy helping each other – and being helped in return (J. Harmer).
When we talk about error correction, we usually speak about errors while speaking or writing a foreign language. The most difficult questions especially for beginner teacher is “When and how should I correct the speech errors of learners in my classroom?” One of the keys, but not the only key, to successful second language learning lies in the feedback that a learner receives from others.
Vigil and Oller (1976) described the model of how affective and cognitive feedback affects the message-sending process. When a learner says something, he meets the “affective feedback”, which looks like a traffic light. The “green light” of the affective feedback mode allows the sender to continue attempting to get a message across; a “red light” causes the sender to abort the attempt. Both affective and cognitive feedback can take place simultaneously. The traffic signal of cognitive feedback is the point at which error correction enters. A green light here symbolizes noncorrective feedback that says “I understand your message”. A red light symbolizes corrective feedback that causes the learner to make some kind of alteration in production. Note that fossilization may be the result of too many green lights when there should have been some yellow or red lights (B.Douglas, 2 edition, p 301).
A teacher should balance positive and negative cognitive feedback. The teacher should provide enough green lights to encourage communication, but not so many that crucial errors go unnoticed. And teacher should provide enough red lights to call attention to those crucial errors, but not so many that the learner is discouraged from attempting to speak at all.