Errors as Signposts to Progress in the ELT

 

A Guide to Development 

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• Performance errors: Mistakes which are lapses in  Performance. Those errors are characteristically unsystematic (Corder, 1974: 24). 
• Failure to utilize a known system correctly (Yaghi, 2017). 
• Competence errors: Reflect inadequate competence. Those errors are systematic (Corder 1974: 24) (e.g. failue to activate aspects of the tenses, word order) . 

• Interlingual Errors (or Transfer or Interference): caused mainly by mother tongue interference, e.g. "organism" used where "body" is the appropriate term, "periphery" used where "province" is intended for the native Greek learners of English, multiple instances of prepositions use, inflections in adjectives, e.g. "pleasants activities" (Touchie, 1986). 

•  Intralingual (or Developmental Errors): those originate in simplification, overgeneralization, hyper-correction, faulty teaching, fossilization, avoidance, inadequate learning, false concepts, hypothesized (e.g. deer-deers) (Touchie, 1986). 

•  Local errors: Do not hinder communication and understanding (Touchie, 1986). 

• Global errors: Interfere with communication and understanding (Touchie, 1986).  Might alter the meaning of the speakers in a substantial way (Gozali, 2018). 

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• Because they have a voice of their own
• They point at the right course of action
• Depending on the occurrence (setting), frequency and type, errors signify the stage of understanding, e.g. morphology errors flag misunderstanding of the word's meaning and/or semantic associations. 
• Accordingly,redress of a morphology errors might include semantic and meaning review (where and how the word is used, e.g. along vs among). 

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• Some errors will be eliminated naturally.
• Useful criteria before directly addressing an error: 
• Frequency & Type (the extent to which comprehensibility is affected). 
• Underlying misunderstangs/gaps (e.g. when verb forms, i.e. the gerund is used as a verb). 

• Use open-ended questions, fill-gap activities, open-cloze text, small-scale free discourse production 
• This enables deeper understanding -even the pinpointing of the root. 
• Differentiate the Input: something not understood in context X, might be understood in context Y. 
• Differentiate the frame of reference: Contextualize or de-contextualize the erroneous utterance. Make sure the focal point is the error and the context does not introduce unfamiliar discourse. 
• Rely on L1 when appropriate. 
• Genuine communication patterns: explain the error in terms of comprehensibility.

• Make sure it is an error. 
• Sometimes, L2 learners, observing the rules they have been taught, create non-existent terms or formulae, e.g., trying to derive word forms which are "accidental gaps" -because the lexicon does not include every potential grammatical structure (Wilson, Gallagher, 2018). This process typically classifies the outcome as being a mistake, but the L2 learner's thought was on the right track. 

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• If we wish to adopt the translingual approach to errors, teachers (and students) need to be more humble about what constitutes a mistake (and what constitutes correctness) in writing, rather than assume that whatever fails to meet their expectations, even in matters of spelling, punctuation and sysntax, must be an error [...]. 
• That the acceptability of notational practice is negotiable demands more responsibility, not less, from both writers and readers (Horner et al., 2011).