Tema 1 - Diario - Error Correction and The Growth Mindset

“A life spent making mistakes is not only more honourable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.” George Bernard Shaw

In the second session of this topic, we were asked to decide what two factors from someone’s L1 have an impact on the learning process of an L2.  For me, it is pronunciation and syntax. 

From my own experience, teaching pronunciation is a very difficult process, not least because it is something that often causes embarrassment on the part of a learner.  I have never once heard a student of mine say, “Well, actually, I’m very happy with my accent.”  It’s a strange situation in many ways, I myself do not have an English accent, and don’t pretend to, but I do put on a ‘Standard’ accent in class, mainly to avoid confusion.  In reality though, students shouldn’t be embarrassed by their accent.  One thing is a pronunciation mistake that impedes understanding (like ship/sheep or beach and the other word…), it’s quite another to have an accent.  I am very aware of my accent when I speak Spanish but I suppose it will always be with me in some way, I take great comfort from Micheal Robinson, a well-known football commentator on Movistar.  Despite having lived in Spain for many years, his accent is still glaringly obvious, but his Spanish is almost perfect. 

Another impact is the syntax of the target language. Word order can be a problem for even advanced students, a sentence makes perfect sense but something about the word order jars on the listeners ears.  Spanish word order is much more flexible that the fixed SVO of English, so a speaker might mix up the order and produce a question like, “Is it ready, the dinner?” Instead of “Is the dinner ready?” Pronouns are another syntactic difference, and students often forget to use them.  Either in Spanish it is not necessary to repeat them or the subject is not necessary at all, for example, saying, “Elena went to the shop.  Bought bread.” or “Is raining”.  These are just one or two examples, but other syntactic differences in adjective noun word order, negation and plurals are also common.  Of course, quite apart from errors my students make, I am also aware of the difficulties I have in learning Spanish. My personal bugbear is gender, further complicated by the fact that I’m told that some words in Spanish are feminine but in Galician they are masculine or vice-versa! 

It is a pity that we won’t have the opportunity to look more at error correction in this course, as I think it’s a very important part of the learning process. One thing we should clarify is what a mistake is.  Julian Edge (1989) identifies three broad categories:

A slip - is a small mistake that students could easily correct themselves.  They know the rule, but at the moment of execution they miss something because of lack of concentration, distraction or other factors. 

            e.g.  They picked up there shoes. 

An error - which students couldn’t correct themselves, the teacher would need to address this.  They may not know the rule, or they may not know it well enough.

            e.g. His room is more tidier than yours

(The student here might have learnt that to make comparisons in English we can add -er or use more, but it might not have been pointed out to them that both are not used together)

An attempt - where students try to be ambitious with language but don’t know how to do this (yet!)

            e.g. I wish he will come to the part tonight

The examples above are illustrative and, of course, what constitutes a slip, error or an attempt varies from student to student. 

Note that, above I said that students don’t know how to do this yet…  this is a very important distinction, and something that Carol Dweck explores in this wonderful RSA Animate video called ‘How To Help Every Child Fulfil Their Potential’.  

She talks about the ‘fixed mindset’ and the ‘growth mindset’ and how we have to be careful how we praise and criticise students. We, as human beings, don’t have a set amount of intelligence, it’s something that can de developed through effort, dedication, learning and mentorship. In a fixed mindset, effort is seen as a negative thing, if you have to try that means you don’t have the ability.  In a growth mindset, effort is seen as part of the process that activates ability. 

Dweck also explores how children react to setbacks in a growth mindset and a fixed mindset.  Those with a fixed mindset try to hide or run from their mistakes and conceal their deficiency.  Those with a growth mindset see mistakes as a part of the process. Praising children is of course important, but how we do it is equally as important. Dweck discovered that praising children’s intelligence or talent harms them, when faced with something difficult, they were reluctant to take on  the challenge because they were scared of being shown up or, proved to be not as inteeligent as they’d been told they were, whereas those praised for the strategy, effort, focus and persistence were comfortable with struggling and perhaps not getting it quite right.  They valued the process rather than intelligence. 

Dweck quotes a school in New York that, instead of failing students on a unit, gives them a score of “Not Yet.” We have to change our value system from “I’m not good at languages” to “I’m not good at languages, yet.” 

This is where error correction comes in, nobody likes making mistakes, and teenagers are especially reluctant to make mistakes and be embarrassed in front of their peers. From my point of view, when I first arrived in Spain and started teaching I was very reluctant to correct learners.  I didn’t want to embarrass them or interrupt the flow of their speech.  My adult students, all with quite low levels, struggled but I couldn’t quite find the right way to correct without discouraging them.  I quickly learnt though, that it is vital to correct or students run the risk of developing ‘fossilised errors’.  I also quickly learnt the right and wrong ways of correcting.  My cardinal rule is that there are no fixed rules.  There is always an exception, and even if the student wants a nice translation for something, there quite often simply isn’t one.  The example of comparisons I usd above is illustrative of how important it is for teachers to explain rules adequately in order to help students avoid mistakes. Yes, we make comparisons with -er, we also use more, but not together.  There are no hard and fast rules, and students must be open to exceptions.  This can only come about when the teacher adequately explains the rule. 

However, mistakes do happen, but how do we deal with them?  Jim Scrivener, whose Learning Teaching is the bible for the CELTA course, gives some advice. First, we must be clear on what the objective of the task is.  If the objective is accuracy, then of course we must be thorough and systematic with correcting errors.  If the objective is fluency, we should be more inclined to let small mistakes go, as long as they don’t impede meaning.  As Julian Edge says, “the most important mistakes are those which affect meaning and communication.”

Scrivener suggests we could simply ask the students to try again, to give them a chance to correct a slip.  If it turns out that it is an error, explanation would be necessary.  Gestures and facial expressions can also help the student along, and also minimise the interruption.  For example, the teacher could simply gesture behind to indicate that a student should rethink their sentence and use the past simple. Teachers could also use finger correction, holding out their hand and indicating where the error occurred.  They could also repeat the sentence up to the error and allow students to correct themselves.  Or they could repeat the error but change the intonation to show where the mistake is.  Humour can also be used effectively, always edging on the side of caution so as not to offend.  What might seem like gentle teasing to the teacher may be mortifying for the student.

Another technique that I have found useful, especially in big groups, is to listen while the students perform a task and note down any errors I hear.  I then put the errors up on the board, but change some key words so that the student doesn’t immediately know that it is their mistake on the board.  For example, a student might say “I am going to the gym every week”. I would change it to “I am going to the cinema every week” and then ask the whole class to identify the mistake.

We as teachers often see speaking tasks as a conclusion to a lesson, but they can also be used effectively at the beginning of a class for the teacher to identify at the point of use what gaps of knowledge there are before teaching a grammar point.  This is something I often did with a PET speaking class I had last year.  These students came to these extra classes to practice solely for the speaking exam; all had different teachers in their regular classes and had spent different lengths of time studying English.  By listening to them doing the speaking tasks, I was able to identify the sort of attempts and errors they were making and effectively point them in the right direction or refresh their memory. 

What it boils down to is changing our attitude to ‘mistakes'.  A mistake is not a dirty word, nor should it be something that we punish students for.  We need to both change how we think and how we react to mistakes in the classroom, instead of something punishable or negative, they are all part of the process.  It’s not the right answer… yet. 

Edge, J. (1989). Mistakes and Correction. London and New York: Longman  
Scrivener, J (2011). Learning Teaching: The Essential Guide to English Language Teaching (3rd Ed.). London: Macmillan