Prof.Grama
Irina Cătălina,ȘcoalaGimnazialăGâdinți
When
learning a language, errors are unavoidable. Error reflects the level of second
students’ proficiency. Students’ errors may be caused
by many factors: first language interference, inadequate second language
knowledge, complexity of the second language, overgeneralization, and/or
psycholinguistic, cognitive and affective variables.
Corrective
feedback has been considered helpful in achieving successful communicative
competence in second language.
Some
studies maintain that if errors are neglected this will be at the expense of
second language accuracy[1],
and other[2]
suggest that immediate feedback during classroom interaction can lead to
improved accuracy.
The
aim is to develop students’
communicative fluency, and in consequence, error correction has to be kept to a
minimum, with priority to errors that tangle communication.
One goal of teaching grammar is to give students the
terminology for naming the words and word groups that make up sentences-in
other words, the parts of speech and the language of phrases and clauses. In
some ways, this goal is the most controversial aspect of teaching grammar. Some
teachers sorely resent the time they are required to spend teaching grammatical
analysis. They do not see any connection between teaching students to identify
the parts of speech and preparing them to communicate effectively in the real
world. And, worst of all, they report that their students do not like grammar
at all. But for other teachers, the key to teaching grammatical terminology is
making the activity meaningful, and the way to make it meaningful is to connect
it with student writing and with their reading as well. Knowing grammatical
terminology is not an end in itself but a means toward greater awareness of how
language and literature work.
v Explicit
correction: the teacher clearly states that student’s error is incorrect and then provides the correct
form. The teacher may use expressions such as You should say, Use this word,
or You mean… .
v Recast:
the teacher implicitly reformulates (paraphrases) all or part of the student’s error or provides the correction
v Clarification
requests: the teacher uses phrases such as Excuse
me?orI do not understand, to
indicate that the utterance of the student was misunderstood by the teacher and hence a
repetition or reformulation by the student is necessary.
v Metalinguistic
clues: the teacher provides information, comments or questions related to the student’s incorrect utterance
indicating the occurrence of an error, such as Do we say it like that in English?
v Elicitation:
the teacher asks questions to elicit the correct form from the student (pushing the student to use the correct
form) such as Say that again, for the
student to reformulate his/her
enunciation.
v Repetition:
the teacher repeats the student’s
error and adjusts intonation to draw the student’s attention to it, such as an cake?when the student
makes an error An … an cake, as an
incorrect use of article.
The
first two types of error correction (explicit correction and recast) are
characterized by the teacher’s intervention to provide students with the correct form
or to reformulate correctly, thus eliminating self-repair by the student. Clarification
requests, metalinguistic clues, elicitation and repetition are more helpful
because they force students to
correct themselves.
As students are pushed
by teachers to repair incorrect forms, they try to reformulate their initial
enunciation in response to their teacher’s feedback. This
feedback-reformulation process ensures that students are actively engaged in
learning second language forms by discussing the form in some way before reformulating.
The success rate of elicitation is 100%, clarification requests - 88%,
metalinguistic clues - 86% and repetition - 78% indicates that these are the
most effective types of error correction[4].
The teachers should draw students’
attention to their errors by providing cues, thus forcing them to draw on their
own linguistic resources to correct themselves.
In
conclusion, error correction helps second language students to develop their
linguistic, discourse and strategic competencies as it aims to ensure correct
communication of messages.
Teachers
should discern the difference between global and local errors: the local errors
usually need not be corrected since the message is clear and correction might
interrupt a student in
the flow of productive communication, while global errors need to be
threatening in some way since the massage may otherwise remain garbled. Many
expressions are not clearly global or local, and it is difficult to discern
necessity for corrective feedback.
The
problem of how to treat errors is complex. There is not one the most effective
method or technique to correct errors. In generally, students want and expect
errors to be corrected.
The best way to help a student to repair malformed
enunciations is, first, to assist the student in noticing an incorrect form and second, for the student to initiate repair.
The teacher needs to
develop the intuition, trough experience and established theoretical
foundation, for ascertaining which option or combination of options is
appropriate at given moments. Principles of optimal affective and cognitive
feedback, of reinforcement theory, and of communicative language teaching all
combine to form those intuitions.
[1]Whitley, M. S., “Communicative Language Teaching: an Incomplete Revolution”, Foreign Language Annals, 26 (2): 137-154, 1993, p. 140.
[2]Lightbown, P.,
Spada, N., How languages are learned,
Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1992.
[3]Lyster, R., and Ranta, L., “Corrective feedback and learner uptake: Negotiation of form in communicative classrooms”, Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 19, 1997, pp. 46-48.
[4]Lyster, R.,
and Ranta, L., “Corrective feedback and
learner uptake: Negotiation of form in communicative classrooms’’, Studies in Second Language Acquisition,
19, 1997, p. 56.
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