This is not an exhaustive or academic post. It is just a reflection of my experiences on the subject.
I wanted to start weekly blog posts as well as making a weekly podcast. Not as easy as you might think with most of the electrical appliances in the house taking a summer holiday, so interruptions were many including a decorator who arrived early without prior warning and affected my timings quite a bit.
Still, I’m here now and in this week’s blog post I would like to discuss making and correcting mistakes in a language-learning environment. Inaccuracies in language learning can be described as mistakes, errors, slips or there may be other terminology applied. Although the words appear synonymous, there are slightly different meanings. For the sake of convenience (yours and mine), I will use the word ‘error’ to describe any linguistic inaccuracies (such as grammatical, lexical, pronunciation or register).
Before I discuss my ways of correcting and being corrected, I’d like to discuss my school age language learning. The two languages I learnt between the ages of ten and sixteen were French and German. I was quite a keen language student as I liked inventing codes when I was younger, so speaking a different language would be like using a code. I started learning French in primary school and seemed to pick it up very well. For the first few years of my secondary school I was top of the class in French. In later years, we merged with other classes, so other students did have a higher level of the language I did. However, in the final year of school, my ability fell apart a bit. It may have been due to other circumstances or it could have been the way my French teacher corrected my errors. This involved writing sarcastic remarks on my homework or shouting so much at people who made errors, he went so red-faced that the kids were worried that he might keel over and have a heart attack (and they’d get the blame). After I left school, I continued to study French at evening classes, but there was so much disruption in those classes I decided to switch to home study. The disadvantage being that there would be nobody to correct my errors.
The other language I studied at school was German. Although I wanted to learn another language, I also took the subject so I didn’t have to take technical drawing (a subject I was useless at and detested). My German teacher appeared insane to us. She was also a music teacher and posed the question to the class, ‘What is classical music?’ One of the students replied, ‘Old music’. She wasn’t impressed and shouted at the student. We decided then that we preferred the music teacher who would discuss Jimi Hendrix with the class.
German vocabulary (for me) was very easy to learn, but the grammar was very complicated. Years later, I discovered that the grammar was rather easy compared to some languages. Our German teacher wasn’t very tolerant of errors and was always threatening detentions to students who dared to get something wrong. So as you can see, there was quite a lot of pressure on the students to be precise…very precise.
I remembered those teachers when I first started my teaching career and made efforts to avoid teaching in this way. Although, as a Director of Studies (DoS), I did have to have a word with one of my staff when I heard him shouting at an elementary level student. He didn’t really see anything wrong with it. However, students on either side of his classroom did comment and so did some of the other staff.