LAMPA Systems s.r.o.
Dolní náměstí 308
755 01 Vsetín
Czech Republic
Tel.: +420 775 115 041
info@mylampa.com
www.mylampa.com
Not everyone likes being corrected.
Correcting mistakes and the decision to interrupt depends on an assessment of the mistake.
Although some learners often ask to have their mistakes corrected, the best reply is a
conditional “yes”. When working with groups, we can’t be expected to please everyone when
it comes to correcting mistakes. Some people hate being interrupted and others think that to
be corrected is why they are there.
At the beginning of every course, it is useful to explain our criteria for making corrections, how
we make corrections and why we do things this way.
Even native speakers make mistakes in their own languages when they speak. This is
normal – our tongues seem to move faster than our brains can tell them what to say. I make
mistakes all the time when I am speaking English, and I am sure that if we ask our learners
which of them has never made a mistake in their mother tongue, very few hands will go up.
There are also dialectical issues that could be interpreted as errors depending on our criteria.
I remember going home to South-western Nova Scotia in Canada for a visit one summer. On
the second evening home, I went to the local pub to meet up with my old friends. We were
sitting around over a couple of beers enjoying a lovely summer evening looking over the
harbour, chatting, having a few laughs and catching up. I overheard one of my close friends,
who was a secondary school teacher at the time and who had taught EFL in France for a
year, saying, ‘No, I haven’t went there yet.’
Immediately, my ears perked up and I bleated out, ‘Brian! You haven’t GONE there yet!’
He calmly turned to me with an ear to ear grin on his face and replied, ‘Steve, … #!&@ $@!.’
It’s not that we shouldn’t correct participle mistakes when learners make them, but that a
normal person, i.e. someone who isn’t English language teacher, would not have corrected
Brian’s dialectical slant on the conjugation the present perfect aspect of ‘go’.
The point being, we don’t need to and shouldn’t correct all minor mistakes. I tell learners that I
break mistakes down into four categories: minor mistakes typically made when speaking
faster than the brain is thinking; mistakes made repeatedly or when the learner should know
better; utterances which I think that a normal native speaker, i.e. a non-English language
teacher, would not understand; and mistakes made when the learner is completely in over his
/ her head and seems to be drowning in a quagmire or complicated vocabulary or grammar.
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LAMPA Systems s.r.o.
Dolní náměstí 308
755 01 Vsetín
Czech Republic
Tel.: +420 775 115 041
info@mylampa.com
www.mylampa.com
We don’t need to correct the small mistakes unless we hear them again and again. That’s
when they move into the second category. Rather than letting the error fossilize, it’s enough
to softly, but audibly, repeat the word or phrase correctly so the leaner has the option of either
going back to repeat the utterance correctly or making a mental note of the correction and
continuing with his discourse. This seems to satisfy both those who like being corrected and
those who don’t like being interrupted.
Correcting the utterances that we suspect a native English speaker on the street would have
difficulty with requires an interruption, usually saying something to the effect of, ‘Uh, sorry,
Maria, I don’t think I quite know what you mean… Could you say that again?’ The problem
here is that the longer we teach learners of the same mother tongue, the more attuned we
become to the type of mistakes they make – we’ve heard it so often that we know what they
mean without clarification. So, when we really should be interrupting the learner, we might
understand what they are saying perfectly well and forget that the native speaker on the
street might not have the foggiest idea what the heck the learner is going on about.
Finally, there are situations when the learner is completely lost. This happens with
diminishing frequency as the learner advances. When the learner seems to be drowning in a
quagmire of complicated language, it is usually best to ignore it and wait to see if he figures
out how to swim. Learning to survive on limited language is an extremely important skill to
learn. There is always more than one way of making a point. Albeit a native speaker might be
able to use five words to articulate what a pre-intermediate-level learner says in 50. The
ability to think laterally to get around the difficult language is one that needs to be developed
and ‘practice makes perfect’, as they say.
In such situations, we note the problem plan and decide whether it is prudent to teach the
language they lack later in the lesson, teach it next lesson, or let it go for now knowing that it
is something not essential at the moment and that they will encounter it again further along in
the curriculum.
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