Unit 29 ☆ Categorising Learners' Mistakes

Categorising Learners' Mistakes


       Who hasn't learned from a situations where we did not do the right thing? It is said that we learn and improve through the process of trial and error in order to become better at something. In the classroom, there are two ways to classify this; errors and slips.

Basically, an Error often occurs due to the lack of knowledge, ex; A student did not check the right way to conjugate the verb fly* in past tense, so he said flyed* instead of flew. This could be categorized as a little problem with accuracy*

An slip occurs when we don't use language in the right way due to other factors that are not related the lack of knowledge, ex; A student has a conversation in which he doesn't use the proper tense of a verb maybe because he got nervous and hesitant.


There are also utterances that are used in a context which are inappropriate, for example; a native spanish-speaker uses the word assisst* to say. "I want to assisst to that meeting with Karla" in Spanish assisst* means attend* not to help, so there is Language 1 interference.

The following is a video which contains strategies to help learners with something that may not be done in the proper way when using language



Also, it is worth to mention that correcting errors and slips is something that should be done or avoided depending on the case and the purpose of a lesson. If we want to achieve fluency with a Speaking task, we should not stop learners to correct their mistakes as they could go shy or lose confidence. Then, if a person didn't like to be told he was doing something wrong, we could correct mistakes indirectly by reading an extract containing the exponent in the right way. Looking for subtle ways to help our students could be the key to help them take out the best of them dependently on the case.


Ultimately, mistakes happen all the time, maybe they go untoticeable or maybe some people have their own linguistic choices and use something in a way they feel it is ok. Language is something that changes so maybe we should keep an eye open to notice that there are many ways to refer to something and if that was not the ccase, subtly help people find solutions for their needs.


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