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Abstract:All the students make mistakes at various stages of their language learning. It is part of the natural process they are going through and occurs for a number of reasons. And it is vital for the teachers to analyze learners’ mistakes, for it possibly helps the teachers to treat them correctly. Furthermore, by working out when and why things have gone wrong, students can learn more about the language they are studying. This paper illustrates how to deal with students’ errors by errors analysis..
Key Words:mistakeerroraffective feedback cognitive feedback
I. Introduction
Human learning is fundamentally a process that involves the making of mistakes. Mistakes, misjudgments, miscalculations, and erroneous assumptions form an important aspect of learning virtually any skill or acquiring information. As Chinese say “Failure is the mother of success”. Learning to swim, to play tennis, or to read all involve a process in which success comes by profiting from mistakes, by using mistakes to obtain feedback from the environment and with that feedback to make new attempts, which successively more closely approximate desired goals.
Language learning, in this sense, is like any other human learning. Children learning their first language make countless “mistakes” from the point of view of adult grammatical language. Many of these mistakes are logical in the limited linguistic system within which children operate, but by carefully processing feedback from others such children slowly but surely learn to produce what is acceptable speech in their native language learning in its trial-and-error nature. Inevitably learners will make mistakes in the process of acquisition, and indeed will even impede that process if they do not commit errors and then benefit in turn from various forms of feedback on those errors.
II. Mistakes and Errors
In order to analyze learner language in proper perspective, the first step is to make a distinction between mistakes and errors, technically two very different phenomena (Rod Ellis, 2000). Errors reflect gaps in a learner’s knowledge; they occur because the learner does not know what is correct. In another word, an error is a noticeable deviation from the adult grammar of a native speaker, reflecting the interlanguage competence of the learner. If a learner of English asks, “Do you can swim?” he is probably reflecting a competence level in which all verbs require a pre-posed do auxiliary for question formation.He has committed an error, most likely not a mistake,and an error,which reveals a portion of his competence in the target language.While mistakes reflect occasional lapses in performance;they occur because, in a particular instance, the learner is unable to perform what he or she knows(Rod Ellis,2000).Thus it is either a random guess or a “slip’”in that it is failure to use a known system correctly.All people make mistakes, in both native and second language situations. There is an example of apparent ‘mistake’ in the speech.
‘I looked out of the window.There were many students on the playground. Some were playing football.Some are playing basketball.’
The speaker uses the past tense of the verb ‘be’ correctly in the sentence‘some were playing football’.However, he then says ‘some are playing basketball’ making what seems to be a past tense error. But clearly he knows what the past tense ‘be’ is as he has already used it correctly once. His failure to say ‘were’ in the last sentence, then, might be considered a mistake.
How can we distinguish errors and mistake”Generally speaking, there are two ways. One way might check the consistency of learners’ performance, for example, if the speaker consistently substitutes ‘are’ for ‘were’ this would indicate a lack of knowledge an error. However, if he sometimes says‘are’ and sometime ‘were’, this would suggest that he possesses knowledge of the correct form and is just slipping up a mistake. Another way might be to ask learners to try to correct their own deviant utterances. Where they are unable to, the deviant are errors;where they are successful, they are mistakes. In fact it is so simple to distinguish them. The teacher should pay more attention to them in teaching to improve the students English.
III. Description of errors
There are several ways to describe and classify errors. One way is to classify errors into grammatical categories. We could gather all the errors relating to verbs and then identify the different kinds of verb errors in our sample- errors in the past tense, for example. Another way might be to try to identify general ways in which the learners’ utterances. Such way include ‘omission’, ‘misinformation’ ‘misordering’ and ‘ addition error’. Classifying errors in theses ways can help us to diagnose learners’ learning problems at any one stage of their development and, also, to plot how changes in errors patterns occur over tome. Thus we can help our students to correct them in time.
IV. Sources of Errors
By trying to identify sources we can begin to arrive at an understanding of how the learner’s cognitive and affective self relates to the linguistic system and to formulate an integrated understanding of the progress of the English learning. It is helpful for teachers to deal with errors.
A.Interlingual Transfer
The beginning stages of learning second language are characterized by a good deal of interlingual transfer from the native language. That is to say the students’ own language may get in the way. In these early stages, before the system of second language is familiar, the native language is the only linguistic system in previous experience upon which the learner can draw. We have all heard English learners say‘a fruit’.‘I like apple’or ‘the book of Jack’.All these errors are attributable to native interlingual transfer.
B.Intralingual Transfer
It is clear that intralingual transfer is a major factor in second language learning, which is within the target language. Researchers (Brown D, 2001) have found that the early stages of language learning are characterized by a predominance of interference(interlingual transfer), but once learners have begun to acquire parts of the new system, more and more intralingual transfer- generalization within the target language- is manifested. As learners progress in the second language, their previous experience and their existing subsumers begin to include structures within the target language itself. Such utterances as “ Does John can sing?” and “He goed.” can illustrate the negative intralingual transfer, or overgeneralization.
C.Context of learning
A third major source of error, though it overlaps types of transfer, is the context of learning.“Context”refers, for example, to the classroom with its teacher and its materials in the case of school learning or the social situation in the case of untutored second language learning. In the classroom context the teacher or the textbook can lead the learner to make faulty hypotheses about the language, what Richards(1974) called “false concepts” and what Stenson(1974) termed “induced errors.”Students often make errors because of a misleading explanation from the teacher, faulty presentation of a structure or word in a textbook, or even because of a pattern that was rotely memorized in a drill but not properly contextualized.Another manifestation of language learned in classroom contexts is the occasional tendency on the part of learners to give uncontracted and inappropriately formal forms of language. We have all experienced foreign learners whose “bookish” language gives them away as classroom language learners.
The social context of language acquisition will produce other types of errors. The sociolinguistic context of natural, untutored language acquisition can give rise to certain dialect acquisition that may itself be a source of error. For example, an immigrant lived in a predominantly Mexican-American area of a city in the United States, and his interlanguage was a rather interesting blend of Mexican-American English and the standard English to which he was explored in the university.
D.Communication Strategies
Communication strategies pertain to the employment of verbal or nonverbal mechanisms for the productive communication of information, which are related to learning styles. Learners obviously use production strategies in order to enhance getting their messages across, but at times these techniques can themselves become a source of error. Once an English learner said, “Let us work for the well done of our country.’ While it exhibited a nice little twist of humor, the sentence had incorrect approximation of the word “welfare.” Likewise, word coinage, circumlocution, false cognates (from Tarone 1981), and prefabricated patterns can all be sources of error.
V. Error correction
We all know,“Failure is the mother of success”. As the focus of classroom instruction has shifted over the past few decades from an emphasis on language forms to attention to functional language within communicative contexts, the question of the place of error correction has become more and more important. How can we deal with the students’ errors in the classroom properly? Error treatment and focus on language forms appears to be most effective when incorporated into a communicative, learner-centered curriculum, and least effective when error correction is a dominant pedagogical feature, occupying the focal attention of students in the classroom.
1. Providing both affective and cognitive feedback
One of the keys to successful learning lies in the feedback that receives from others. According to Vigil and Oller, negative affective feedback, regardless of the degree of cognitive feedback, will likely result in the abortion of future attempts to communication. A positive affective response is imperative to the learner’s desire to continue attempts to communicate. Cognitive feedback determines the degree of internalization. Negative or neutive feedback in the cognitive dimension will, with the prerequisite positive affective feedback, encourage learners to ‘try again,’ to restate, to reformulate, or to draw a different hypothesis about a rule. Positive feedback in the cognitive dimension will result in reinforcement of the forms used and a conclusion on the part of learners that their speech is well formed. Table1 metaphorically depicts what happens in affective feedback and cognitive feedback
Affective Feedback Cognitive Feedback
Table1 Affective and cognitive feedback
The‘green light’of the affective feedback mode allows the sender to continue attempting to get a message across; a ‘red light’ causes the sender to abort such attempts. The traffic signal of cognitive feedback is the point at which error correction enters in. A green light here symbolizes noncorrective feedback that says ‘I understand your message.’A red light symbolizes corrective feedback that takes on a myriad of possible forms and causes the learner to make some alteration in production.To push the metaphor further, a yellow light could represent those various shades of color that are interpreted by the learner as falling somewhere in between a complete green light and a red light, causing the learner to adjust, to alter, to recycle back, to try again in some way. Note that fossilization may be the result of too many green lights when there should have been some yellow or red lights.
The most useful implication of Vigil and Oller’s model for a theory of error correction is that cognitive feedback must be optimal in order to be effective. too much negative cognitive feedback a barrage of interruptions, corrections, and overt attention to malformations- often leads learners to shut off their attempts at communication. They perceive that so much is wrong with their production that there is little hope to get anything right. It may make the students feel uneasy, self-doubt, fear, and tension. On the other hand, too much positive cognitive feedback- willingness of then teacher-hearer to let errors go uncorrected, to indicate understanding when understanding may not occurred- serves to reinforce the errors of the speaker-learner. The result is the persistence, and perhaps the eventual fossilization, of such errors, and meanwhile the students may think the teacher are not responsible for them who want the teacher to correct errors. The task of the teacher is to discern the optimal tension between positive and negative cognitive feedback: providing enough green lights to encourage continued communication, but not call many that crucial errors go unnoticed, and providing enough red lights to call attention those crucial errors, but not so many that the learner is discouraged from attempting to speak at all.
2. How and when to treat errors
However how and when to treat errors in the classroom is not simple. Having noticed an error, the first decision the teacher makes is whether or not to treat it at all. Correction helps students to clarify their understanding of the meaning and construction of language. It is a vital part of the teacher’s role, and something the teacher is uniquely able to provide, but precisely because it involves pointing out people’s mistakes, we have to be careful when correcting since, if we do it in an insensitive way, we can upset our students and dent their confidence. In an investigation the students said, “The teacher should be able to correct people without offending them.” And what is appropriate for one student may be quite wrong for another one.
As with any kind of correction, it is important not to single students out for particular criticism. The teacher should deal with the mistakes they hear without saying who make them. The teacher can also sit down together with the students and calmly and rationally examine a problem without blaming anyone.
5. Providing informational feedback in time
This brings us to the aspect of the teacher’s role in motivation as the provider of feedback. Weinstein (1989) once explicitly pointed out that the form and amount that were supplied by the teacher had a direct influence on the learner’s study motivation, self-awareness and sense of achievement in study, which, furthermore, influenced the students’ study effect. In foreign language teaching feedback indicates information on accomplishment of a study task in order to improve and raise the students’ study effect. It can be given by means of praise, by any relevant comment or action, or by silence. Here I highlight the feedback of homework (review or preview) and test, for most students complain their homework isn’t often corrected in time and this influence their learning motivation. Feedback can be information of correctness or errors. With the help related information obtained from the teacher’s feedback, the students keep abreast of the advance and result of his study motivation and level of his study behavior for great progress in study. My teaching experiment can certify the teaching effect of feedback approach as illustrated by the following experiment record.
Table 2 feedbacks to homework on students in Grade 2011
The exercises are the part -Vocabulary & Structure, from model exercises of Practical English Test For Colleges; the experiment period is from March 1 to April 28, 2011. The experiment approach is to give subjects feedback in time after homework; the goal to reach is to foster students’ motivation and interest, and to gain improvement in learning. During the experiment the teacher adopted the method to supply information feedback of the exercises for them, by analyzing and generalizing typical errors in them to acquaint them with typical types of errors so that they can master the uses of related vocabulary and structures and enhance their ability to achieve good result and strengthen their confidence. Meanwhile, the teacher praised the best to set examples for others to follow, encouraged the ones with progress, affirmed the progress in the whole group, do not place any pressure upon the poor, but discerns their improvement to push them forward. From Table 2 we can find that during the experiments, the subjects in Class A and Class B, got the feedback in time, mastered the uses of the vocabulary and structure, made progress step by step; While Class C don’t have obvious or great progress because of lacking the feedback. From this I believe that information feedback is necessary for the students to know themselves, to master the knowledge, to form their confidence, which can help them to strengthen their motivation to improve their learning.
Never, never ask students to prepare an assignment that you do not intend to read, comment on, and return as soon as possible. Everybody feels better if he knows how he is doing on a given task. “How much further do we have to go? How much longer before the test? When will the grades be out?” All such questions are indications of the eagerness to know results. In order for a student to challenge himself it is necessary for him to know he is progressing. Such continuous evaluation is necessary to the idea of progressive goal setting. Anyone is more likely to avoid errors if he knows what those errors are. In addition, it is important for the students to be able to understand not only that he made a mistake but why. Otherwise, there is no point to evaluation.
Providing feedback is one of the very effective ways of motivating students to apply themselves to the task at hand. Such motivation is honest and fair, it is not contaminated with competition and it is not filled with blame. It simply says to the students this is what you did and you will do better.
6. Making the students adopt a correct attitude towards the errors
First, the teacher should tell the students that to err is human. And the mistakes they make in speaking and writing English can help them improve their speaking and writing. Second, tell students that their teachers made such and such mistakes when they were students studying English. Third, try hard to encourage students but not to blame them when they make mistakes. Fourth, provide students more chances to take moderate but intelligent risks in the classroom and allow them to make mistakes. Give them chance to correct the errors by themselves or help them to correct errors appropriately.
VI. Conclusion
The matter of how to correct errors is complex. It is the teacher’s role to correct the students’ errors appropriately. Explaining to students that they have made a mistake is one of the most perilous encounters in the classroom. It has to be done with tact. We have to measure what is appropriate for a particular student in a particular situation. Whatever we do, the students can benefit from it. When we correct errors, we should pay more attention to the students’ emotion. We do not let students have anxiety and lose face and self-confidence. The purpose is encourage students to learn English actively so as to make more progress and use the target language correctly avoiding fossilization in studying.
VII. Bibliography
紀迎春.Different Policies to Different Errors. Anhui :Overseas English, Anhui Science & technology Publishing House and Anhui Publishing Group,2011
Brown D. Principles of Language Learning and Teaching. Beijing: Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press, 2001
Jeremy Harmer. How to Teach English. Beijing: Foreign Language Teaching and Researching Press 2000.
Richards. Error Analysis: Perspectives on Second Language Acquisition. London: Longman Group, Ltd.1974
Rod Ellis. Second Language Acquisition. Shanghai Foreign Language Education Press. 2000
Stenson , Nancy. Induced errors. In Schumann and Stenson 1974
Tyrone ,Elaine. Some thoughts on the notion of communication strategy. TESOL Quarterly, 1981
Weinstein C. S. Teacher Education Students’ Perception of Teaching [J]. Journal of Teacher Education, 40/2: 53-60, 1989
Key Words:mistakeerroraffective feedback cognitive feedback
I. Introduction
Human learning is fundamentally a process that involves the making of mistakes. Mistakes, misjudgments, miscalculations, and erroneous assumptions form an important aspect of learning virtually any skill or acquiring information. As Chinese say “Failure is the mother of success”. Learning to swim, to play tennis, or to read all involve a process in which success comes by profiting from mistakes, by using mistakes to obtain feedback from the environment and with that feedback to make new attempts, which successively more closely approximate desired goals.
Language learning, in this sense, is like any other human learning. Children learning their first language make countless “mistakes” from the point of view of adult grammatical language. Many of these mistakes are logical in the limited linguistic system within which children operate, but by carefully processing feedback from others such children slowly but surely learn to produce what is acceptable speech in their native language learning in its trial-and-error nature. Inevitably learners will make mistakes in the process of acquisition, and indeed will even impede that process if they do not commit errors and then benefit in turn from various forms of feedback on those errors.
II. Mistakes and Errors
In order to analyze learner language in proper perspective, the first step is to make a distinction between mistakes and errors, technically two very different phenomena (Rod Ellis, 2000). Errors reflect gaps in a learner’s knowledge; they occur because the learner does not know what is correct. In another word, an error is a noticeable deviation from the adult grammar of a native speaker, reflecting the interlanguage competence of the learner. If a learner of English asks, “Do you can swim?” he is probably reflecting a competence level in which all verbs require a pre-posed do auxiliary for question formation.He has committed an error, most likely not a mistake,and an error,which reveals a portion of his competence in the target language.While mistakes reflect occasional lapses in performance;they occur because, in a particular instance, the learner is unable to perform what he or she knows(Rod Ellis,2000).Thus it is either a random guess or a “slip’”in that it is failure to use a known system correctly.All people make mistakes, in both native and second language situations. There is an example of apparent ‘mistake’ in the speech.
‘I looked out of the window.There were many students on the playground. Some were playing football.Some are playing basketball.’
The speaker uses the past tense of the verb ‘be’ correctly in the sentence‘some were playing football’.However, he then says ‘some are playing basketball’ making what seems to be a past tense error. But clearly he knows what the past tense ‘be’ is as he has already used it correctly once. His failure to say ‘were’ in the last sentence, then, might be considered a mistake.
How can we distinguish errors and mistake”Generally speaking, there are two ways. One way might check the consistency of learners’ performance, for example, if the speaker consistently substitutes ‘are’ for ‘were’ this would indicate a lack of knowledge an error. However, if he sometimes says‘are’ and sometime ‘were’, this would suggest that he possesses knowledge of the correct form and is just slipping up a mistake. Another way might be to ask learners to try to correct their own deviant utterances. Where they are unable to, the deviant are errors;where they are successful, they are mistakes. In fact it is so simple to distinguish them. The teacher should pay more attention to them in teaching to improve the students English.
III. Description of errors
There are several ways to describe and classify errors. One way is to classify errors into grammatical categories. We could gather all the errors relating to verbs and then identify the different kinds of verb errors in our sample- errors in the past tense, for example. Another way might be to try to identify general ways in which the learners’ utterances. Such way include ‘omission’, ‘misinformation’ ‘misordering’ and ‘ addition error’. Classifying errors in theses ways can help us to diagnose learners’ learning problems at any one stage of their development and, also, to plot how changes in errors patterns occur over tome. Thus we can help our students to correct them in time.
IV. Sources of Errors
By trying to identify sources we can begin to arrive at an understanding of how the learner’s cognitive and affective self relates to the linguistic system and to formulate an integrated understanding of the progress of the English learning. It is helpful for teachers to deal with errors.
A.Interlingual Transfer
The beginning stages of learning second language are characterized by a good deal of interlingual transfer from the native language. That is to say the students’ own language may get in the way. In these early stages, before the system of second language is familiar, the native language is the only linguistic system in previous experience upon which the learner can draw. We have all heard English learners say‘a fruit’.‘I like apple’or ‘the book of Jack’.All these errors are attributable to native interlingual transfer.
B.Intralingual Transfer
It is clear that intralingual transfer is a major factor in second language learning, which is within the target language. Researchers (Brown D, 2001) have found that the early stages of language learning are characterized by a predominance of interference(interlingual transfer), but once learners have begun to acquire parts of the new system, more and more intralingual transfer- generalization within the target language- is manifested. As learners progress in the second language, their previous experience and their existing subsumers begin to include structures within the target language itself. Such utterances as “ Does John can sing?” and “He goed.” can illustrate the negative intralingual transfer, or overgeneralization.
C.Context of learning
A third major source of error, though it overlaps types of transfer, is the context of learning.“Context”refers, for example, to the classroom with its teacher and its materials in the case of school learning or the social situation in the case of untutored second language learning. In the classroom context the teacher or the textbook can lead the learner to make faulty hypotheses about the language, what Richards(1974) called “false concepts” and what Stenson(1974) termed “induced errors.”Students often make errors because of a misleading explanation from the teacher, faulty presentation of a structure or word in a textbook, or even because of a pattern that was rotely memorized in a drill but not properly contextualized.Another manifestation of language learned in classroom contexts is the occasional tendency on the part of learners to give uncontracted and inappropriately formal forms of language. We have all experienced foreign learners whose “bookish” language gives them away as classroom language learners.
The social context of language acquisition will produce other types of errors. The sociolinguistic context of natural, untutored language acquisition can give rise to certain dialect acquisition that may itself be a source of error. For example, an immigrant lived in a predominantly Mexican-American area of a city in the United States, and his interlanguage was a rather interesting blend of Mexican-American English and the standard English to which he was explored in the university.
D.Communication Strategies
Communication strategies pertain to the employment of verbal or nonverbal mechanisms for the productive communication of information, which are related to learning styles. Learners obviously use production strategies in order to enhance getting their messages across, but at times these techniques can themselves become a source of error. Once an English learner said, “Let us work for the well done of our country.’ While it exhibited a nice little twist of humor, the sentence had incorrect approximation of the word “welfare.” Likewise, word coinage, circumlocution, false cognates (from Tarone 1981), and prefabricated patterns can all be sources of error.
V. Error correction
We all know,“Failure is the mother of success”. As the focus of classroom instruction has shifted over the past few decades from an emphasis on language forms to attention to functional language within communicative contexts, the question of the place of error correction has become more and more important. How can we deal with the students’ errors in the classroom properly? Error treatment and focus on language forms appears to be most effective when incorporated into a communicative, learner-centered curriculum, and least effective when error correction is a dominant pedagogical feature, occupying the focal attention of students in the classroom.
1. Providing both affective and cognitive feedback
One of the keys to successful learning lies in the feedback that receives from others. According to Vigil and Oller, negative affective feedback, regardless of the degree of cognitive feedback, will likely result in the abortion of future attempts to communication. A positive affective response is imperative to the learner’s desire to continue attempts to communicate. Cognitive feedback determines the degree of internalization. Negative or neutive feedback in the cognitive dimension will, with the prerequisite positive affective feedback, encourage learners to ‘try again,’ to restate, to reformulate, or to draw a different hypothesis about a rule. Positive feedback in the cognitive dimension will result in reinforcement of the forms used and a conclusion on the part of learners that their speech is well formed. Table1 metaphorically depicts what happens in affective feedback and cognitive feedback
Affective Feedback Cognitive Feedback
Table1 Affective and cognitive feedback
The‘green light’of the affective feedback mode allows the sender to continue attempting to get a message across; a ‘red light’ causes the sender to abort such attempts. The traffic signal of cognitive feedback is the point at which error correction enters in. A green light here symbolizes noncorrective feedback that says ‘I understand your message.’A red light symbolizes corrective feedback that takes on a myriad of possible forms and causes the learner to make some alteration in production.To push the metaphor further, a yellow light could represent those various shades of color that are interpreted by the learner as falling somewhere in between a complete green light and a red light, causing the learner to adjust, to alter, to recycle back, to try again in some way. Note that fossilization may be the result of too many green lights when there should have been some yellow or red lights.
The most useful implication of Vigil and Oller’s model for a theory of error correction is that cognitive feedback must be optimal in order to be effective. too much negative cognitive feedback a barrage of interruptions, corrections, and overt attention to malformations- often leads learners to shut off their attempts at communication. They perceive that so much is wrong with their production that there is little hope to get anything right. It may make the students feel uneasy, self-doubt, fear, and tension. On the other hand, too much positive cognitive feedback- willingness of then teacher-hearer to let errors go uncorrected, to indicate understanding when understanding may not occurred- serves to reinforce the errors of the speaker-learner. The result is the persistence, and perhaps the eventual fossilization, of such errors, and meanwhile the students may think the teacher are not responsible for them who want the teacher to correct errors. The task of the teacher is to discern the optimal tension between positive and negative cognitive feedback: providing enough green lights to encourage continued communication, but not call many that crucial errors go unnoticed, and providing enough red lights to call attention those crucial errors, but not so many that the learner is discouraged from attempting to speak at all.
2. How and when to treat errors
However how and when to treat errors in the classroom is not simple. Having noticed an error, the first decision the teacher makes is whether or not to treat it at all. Correction helps students to clarify their understanding of the meaning and construction of language. It is a vital part of the teacher’s role, and something the teacher is uniquely able to provide, but precisely because it involves pointing out people’s mistakes, we have to be careful when correcting since, if we do it in an insensitive way, we can upset our students and dent their confidence. In an investigation the students said, “The teacher should be able to correct people without offending them.” And what is appropriate for one student may be quite wrong for another one.
As with any kind of correction, it is important not to single students out for particular criticism. The teacher should deal with the mistakes they hear without saying who make them. The teacher can also sit down together with the students and calmly and rationally examine a problem without blaming anyone.
5. Providing informational feedback in time
This brings us to the aspect of the teacher’s role in motivation as the provider of feedback. Weinstein (1989) once explicitly pointed out that the form and amount that were supplied by the teacher had a direct influence on the learner’s study motivation, self-awareness and sense of achievement in study, which, furthermore, influenced the students’ study effect. In foreign language teaching feedback indicates information on accomplishment of a study task in order to improve and raise the students’ study effect. It can be given by means of praise, by any relevant comment or action, or by silence. Here I highlight the feedback of homework (review or preview) and test, for most students complain their homework isn’t often corrected in time and this influence their learning motivation. Feedback can be information of correctness or errors. With the help related information obtained from the teacher’s feedback, the students keep abreast of the advance and result of his study motivation and level of his study behavior for great progress in study. My teaching experiment can certify the teaching effect of feedback approach as illustrated by the following experiment record.
Table 2 feedbacks to homework on students in Grade 2011
The exercises are the part -Vocabulary & Structure, from model exercises of Practical English Test For Colleges; the experiment period is from March 1 to April 28, 2011. The experiment approach is to give subjects feedback in time after homework; the goal to reach is to foster students’ motivation and interest, and to gain improvement in learning. During the experiment the teacher adopted the method to supply information feedback of the exercises for them, by analyzing and generalizing typical errors in them to acquaint them with typical types of errors so that they can master the uses of related vocabulary and structures and enhance their ability to achieve good result and strengthen their confidence. Meanwhile, the teacher praised the best to set examples for others to follow, encouraged the ones with progress, affirmed the progress in the whole group, do not place any pressure upon the poor, but discerns their improvement to push them forward. From Table 2 we can find that during the experiments, the subjects in Class A and Class B, got the feedback in time, mastered the uses of the vocabulary and structure, made progress step by step; While Class C don’t have obvious or great progress because of lacking the feedback. From this I believe that information feedback is necessary for the students to know themselves, to master the knowledge, to form their confidence, which can help them to strengthen their motivation to improve their learning.
Never, never ask students to prepare an assignment that you do not intend to read, comment on, and return as soon as possible. Everybody feels better if he knows how he is doing on a given task. “How much further do we have to go? How much longer before the test? When will the grades be out?” All such questions are indications of the eagerness to know results. In order for a student to challenge himself it is necessary for him to know he is progressing. Such continuous evaluation is necessary to the idea of progressive goal setting. Anyone is more likely to avoid errors if he knows what those errors are. In addition, it is important for the students to be able to understand not only that he made a mistake but why. Otherwise, there is no point to evaluation.
Providing feedback is one of the very effective ways of motivating students to apply themselves to the task at hand. Such motivation is honest and fair, it is not contaminated with competition and it is not filled with blame. It simply says to the students this is what you did and you will do better.
6. Making the students adopt a correct attitude towards the errors
First, the teacher should tell the students that to err is human. And the mistakes they make in speaking and writing English can help them improve their speaking and writing. Second, tell students that their teachers made such and such mistakes when they were students studying English. Third, try hard to encourage students but not to blame them when they make mistakes. Fourth, provide students more chances to take moderate but intelligent risks in the classroom and allow them to make mistakes. Give them chance to correct the errors by themselves or help them to correct errors appropriately.
VI. Conclusion
The matter of how to correct errors is complex. It is the teacher’s role to correct the students’ errors appropriately. Explaining to students that they have made a mistake is one of the most perilous encounters in the classroom. It has to be done with tact. We have to measure what is appropriate for a particular student in a particular situation. Whatever we do, the students can benefit from it. When we correct errors, we should pay more attention to the students’ emotion. We do not let students have anxiety and lose face and self-confidence. The purpose is encourage students to learn English actively so as to make more progress and use the target language correctly avoiding fossilization in studying.
VII. Bibliography
紀迎春.Different Policies to Different Errors. Anhui :Overseas English, Anhui Science & technology Publishing House and Anhui Publishing Group,2011
Brown D. Principles of Language Learning and Teaching. Beijing: Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press, 2001
Jeremy Harmer. How to Teach English. Beijing: Foreign Language Teaching and Researching Press 2000.
Richards. Error Analysis: Perspectives on Second Language Acquisition. London: Longman Group, Ltd.1974
Rod Ellis. Second Language Acquisition. Shanghai Foreign Language Education Press. 2000
Stenson , Nancy. Induced errors. In Schumann and Stenson 1974
Tyrone ,Elaine. Some thoughts on the notion of communication strategy. TESOL Quarterly, 1981
Weinstein C. S. Teacher Education Students’ Perception of Teaching [J]. Journal of Teacher Education, 40/2: 53-60, 1989