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Activity 3, Handout 3
INTERLANGUAGE AND ERROR CORRECTION
by Rod Bolitho
Applied linguists have done a lot of good over the years but mostly their theories are of interest to their fellow academics. On the other hand, in the area of errors they have helped teachers in all sorts of ways. There’s a concept that I’d like to share with you. It is called ‘interlanguage’ and it comes from the field of second language acquisition. If you take this continuum as being all the way from beginner to native speaker’s standard in a language, this continuum is sometimes called interlanguage. It is literally ‘language between the languages’, it’s when you are in between being a beginner and a native speaker.
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. It is because when they are trying to say what they still cannot say, they are trying to express what they really want tosay, so their motivation is higher than when they are just repeating things from the textbook or repeating things which you want them to repeat in a drill or in an exercise. Stephen Krashen, one of the leading theoreticians about the role of errors, had some very useful things to say. One of them was that learners have an in-built monitor and that they can monitor their own errors to a certain extent, but only the post-systematic ones. The presystematic ones they need your help with, but help in a supportive way. And Krashen also holds that errors are ‘stepping stones on the way to learning’. This has been an insight which also to some extent disturbed the practice of language teaching.
Traditionally errors are used to discriminate between strong students and weak students, so that the one who makes more mistakes is a weak student and the one who makes fewer mistakes is a strong student. But what happens when a student who makes fewer mistakes does so only because she decides to limit her language only to what she knows? And then another student took risks, experimented with the language and made more mistakes as the result of this. Which student is more likely to make progress in a language? The second one. And yet our system recognises errors as something bad. There’s a notion that an error is a sin, that if you make a mistake you should go and confess, that there’s something wrong with an error. But if we take another view, that errors are developmental, then even in the classroom this should change our attitudes to the ways we correct our students’ mistakes and to their efforts at producing English. We should recognise when a student is experimenting, trying something out and we should support this student. We should also recognise when a student can self-correct and we should give them an opportunity to self-correct. And if there is a positive attitude to error in a classroom, then peer-correction should not cause any ‘loss of face’ for your students. It will be seen as supportive.
Teachers should be able to recognise which errors are from mother tongue interference, which errors come from false analogy, bad learning, poor learning and so on. Talking about different techniques of error correction, one of the things that Krashen keeps on saying is that if you give your students comprehensible input, if you give them language which is understandable at a little bit above their level, they will be motivated to listen to it, to read it and to learn from it. Errors go away when the student is ready to get rid of them, and not when the teacher wants them to go away, sadly for us.
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