THE IMPORTANCE OF ERRORS´ CORRECTION

The errors’ study is an important part of students learning process, since they could be viewed by teachers and students as potential indicators of weaknesses and important sources of improvement. However, in some cases, teachers are not well prepared to give a special treatment of those errors and some of them lost useful opportunities to make their students aware about their importance. In fact, researchers have tried to answer many questions related to the study of errors, some focused on their taxonomy, others in their evaluation and others in their causes but those studies have presented a lot of debilities and they have generated new doubts.

 According to Hedge, Tricia (2000)”Errors are conceived as undesirable forms of language, accuracy in grammatical rules are one of the strongest aspects”. Fortunately, in spite of that the principles of the communicative approach argue that teachers´ main task is providing students with chances to use the language to interact with others. On this respect, Brown(2004) claims that “Beyond grammatical and discourse elements in communication, we are probing the nature of social, cultural and pragmatic features of language and exploring pedagogical means for “real-life” communication in classroom” (p.77)

In first place, one of the most important aspects of error correction models is the way teachers conceive the language assessment. It could be influenced by the way they perceive language, since some teachers based their practices on behavioristic  or audio-lingual models( among others) where learning a language is thought as an accurate report of speech or writing texts, more than as a mean to relate with others. The point is not just to frame language learning in a correct production of well-structured forms but in a natural process of interaction with others for both: comprehending what others want to express and being understood. Based on Allwright D and Baley K (1994)” Research on error treatment to date has been limited largely to accuracy errors, which are relatively easy to identify, but clearly we will not be able to say we know very much about the error treatment” (p. 85)

For that reason, giving an adequate and meaningful feedback is the desired final step in teacher´s assessment. This is the opportunity for students to make it better. However, we often assigned tasks and evaluated them only once, without giving our students opportunities for revising, reflecting, editing and delivering or presenting again evidencing a process of growing which is followed step by step through practice. Skilbeck (1984) says that “assessment is a process of determining and passing judgments on student´s learning potential and performance”. However, we focus our attention in detecting incorrect forms of language while they are trying to produce something. So, what is the purpose to detect only failures in our students? If we did so what is our role as a teachers in the learning process?

Secondly, based on the behavioristic approach as cited by Ellis (1994) errors are the result of a negative transfer of L1 habits. On the contrary, for mentalistic approaches errors are considered as natural part of the learning process and labeled as intralingual because they are constructed in the basis of L1.If errors correction is leaded as the whole assessment of a process as a end-of term of a topic it will give as just a part of the all learning process carried out by the student. That it to say, the whole process imply a view not just on student´s failures as in a countable corpus but also student´s strengths. For that reason, it is vital for us as teachers to ask ourselves: Have students gained a clear idea of their errors importance or how to overcome them? Do students have to opportunities to correct and learn from their own errors?

Thirdly, it implies a redefinition of errors analysis since the learner´s perception. Most of them just view the paper full of red marks looking for the score and that´s all. The majority of them do not analyze what their failures where and why. A good process of errors corrections provides students with meaningful data to know and to grow through the language reinforcement. Similarly, when they are speaking and they are corrected they feel unsecured for a next time participation so, they decide avoid the communicative situations and do not take risks.

Finally, I would like to reflect about the situation my little daughter of eight years old is facing up in her English class, which is closely related with those wrong conceptions that some teachers have about error corrections. Some weeks ago, when I was revising her English notebook, I read a note made by the principal about my daughter´s lack of quality to do things. He wrote “there is a lack of quality in everything” and writes a 3.0 as a final score followed by his signature (see appendix 1). I was really concerned about this situation because of many reasons: firstly, I assumed it was a qualification of her notebook in terms of esthetic form because he also made comments about her calligraphy and the use of pen. Secondly, he was evaluating a process through a notebook record which was well presented in terms of classroom work and esthetics. Thirdly, he is not an English teacher so he does not know anything about its teaching and learning processes, so what kind of criteria could he have to asses and to assign a mark? Then I talked to my daughter, who is in fourth grade, and she told me she was really sad about the score because her partners got a better mark and she did not comprehend why? I asked her about her comprehension of the hard expression” lack of quality” and she answered to me” it is my ugly calligraphy, drawings and coloring”. I felt so terrible when I heard that but I just forgot that first signal.

That weekend was the beginning of holy week and my sister was asked to write 20 sentences with the pronouns and verb to be, also, to describe some members of the family supported by drawings. I have noticed that she was studied at school something about present continuous, then some adjectives and vocabulary related to clothing, and then she was just working with pronouns and verb To Be in present. She was confused about the use of Have, Ing forms, To Be and to wear and I thought teacher did not deal a well coherent process because she was teaching at the end, the topic she should be taught at the beginning. So, I gave my daughter some vocabulary related to professions and places as necessary input to perform the first task described above (to write the 20 sentences) it was easy for her to construct them and she drew some images to associate the new words. When, she delivered her homework her teacher looked at the sentences and they were good but when she looked at the drawings she got angry and told to my daughter to pull the homework’s sheets out and to repeat the whole task again. Finally, she wrote on the notebook “do the homework again. There is a lack of quality!! (see appendix 1)

This time I was angry because of teacher´s attitude, my daughter came back home sad saying she did not do things well; she did not know anything about English that I was teaching her in a wrong way. I decided to go to the school and to talk to the teacher. When I arrived she began to make negative comments about my daughter’s low performance in the subject and she affirmed that will lose the subject that period for sure since she could not do anything correctly, for example she said “she did not draw and color as a child of fourth grade”, also, she claimed that she was the unique student who lost the oral evaluation and the written exam presented two days before. I was in shock because I knew my daughter had the competence, so what was happening with her performance? I required the exam to make some analysis about it and when the teacher came back she told me “I apologize with you because she passed the oral exam I was confused “. In that moment I felt she was making judgments of my daughter performance based on her subjective impressions. 

However, she got a bad score in the written exam (2,0). I noticed that my daughter was ashamed, sad and unmotivated. When I was revising the text I realized my daughter had answered everything and her answers were related to the questions. Her errors were misspelling words and the incorrect use of noun- adjective (pants blue) but in general terms she tried to accomplish with the task (see appendix 2). As a teacher I consider there were a lot of big mistakes inside this assessment process, the use of disqualified and level appropriated comments for the teacher and the principal, the principal´s intromission in the process, the teacher preferences towards esthetics aspects more in the communicative purpose of language, her subjective wrong impressions about my daughter which were centered on her failures and the inadequate score she gave at the written text focused on detecting well written words and forms of language more than in the language function. According to Oller´s (1976) as cited by Allwright D and Baley K (1994) “teacher must provide learners with appropriate cognitive feedback as well as affective support” (p.99)

REFERENCES:

Allwright, D and Bailey, K (1994). Focus on the language classroom. The treatment of oral errors in language classrooms (p. 82-86) Cambridge: Unversity Press.

Brown, H. Douglas (1994). Teaching by principles. USA: Editorial Paramount.

Ellis,R (1994). The study of second language acquisition. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Hedge, Tricia(2000). Teaching and learning in the Language Classroom.  Oxford U.P

Skilbeck (1984.  School Based Curriculum development. London: Paul Chapman