Awareness Learners should be encouraged to view a language as a complex living phenomenon and not just as a number of words arranged according to simple rules. Introduce the term ‘language awareness’

Error correction techniques

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  Mistakes are like diseases or viruses – they should be prevented, if possible. If this is not possible, then a teacher, like a doctor, should diagnose the disease and prescribe the appropriate medicine.
  
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  2. Mistakes are the signs of students’ poor work during the lessons or at home. Students who make mistakes should therefore be punished and made to work harder.
  
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  3. Mistakes are unavoidable in learning a language and should be ignored – with time and practice they will take care of themselves.
  
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  4. Mistakes are just wrong and the teacher should immediately correct them before they happen again.
  

5. Mistakes are learning steps and the teacher should help students to deal with and learn from their mistakes.
There are a lot of studies about mistakes and the role they play in the development of the interlanguage in learners. One of the first insights in interlanguage was that there are some mistakes that learners can self-correct and there are others, which learners cannot self correct. As teachers, we should distinguish between these types of mistake. For example, learners should be able to self-correct post-systematic mistakes. A post-systematic mistake is an error in a structure or a piece of vocabulary which the learner is supposed to have learned, which that learner has been exposed to already. This kind of post-systematic error is susceptible to self-correction or peer-correction and is typical in students who are at some point along this continuum but still finding the language difficult. As we know, learners never learn what teachers teach. Teachers often get irritated by students making a lot of mistakes. These errors are mostly post-systematic and they irritate teachers because they think that the learners should know this by now and that they shouldn’t be making this kind of mistake. But there is another kind of error, which is a pre-systematic error. And a pre-systematic error results from a learner trying to express something which they don’t yet have the linguistic tools to express. Those errors cannot be self-corrected because the learner doesn’t have the system internalised that they need in order to correct that error. You often notice it with learners when they are trying to say something spontaneously, something real from their own life, something that they really want to tell you which is not in the textbook. They are trying to use language for communicative purposes. You can encourage your learners to experiment with language or you may say ‘oh, no, don’t try to say that yet because you’re not ready to do it.’ However, there is evidence that if you encourage your learners to experiment with language they seem to be learning more effectively.