时间：2022-06-13 02:53:45
Abstract: We usually find that students often make mistakes in English learning. How to treat student’s mistakes in English learning is an important thing for us. We should analyze these mistakes and take proper ways to correct them to let students learn English well.
Key words: mistakes kinds skills
As a teacher, we usually find that students often make mistakes in English learning, such as slips of the tongue, interference of native language, over-generalization of a rule, etc. How to treat student’s mistakes in English learning is an important thing for us. Here, I’d like to make some comments on when and how to correct mistakes.
一、When to correct mistakes:
When the teacher deals with language produced by students, he has a task, that is, identifying the students’ mistakes. To treat or to ignore these mistakes depend on the mistakes’ nature. The teacher should know whether they are competence mistakes or performance mistakes.
Students make competence mistakes because they have not master the language rules. For example: ①She are a girl. ②He have long hairs. ③Each of the children have his own kite. ④They didn’t went to the Great Wall last Sunday. Such mistakes need to be corrected and avoided by practicing. The teacher should explain the language rules carefully and do more writing exercises till the students master the rules.
If students make performance mistakes, for instance: the teaching task is training the students’ oral English. Students make mistakes because of exciting, fear, etc. They may say: I want have some fruit, She isn’t like apples, etc. Here accuracy is not as important as fluency, in this situation, we can ignore the mistake that does not interfere with the meaning of the sentence, and we may encourage or say high prize for the students. Students will have confidence to practice the oral English, it’s good for improving their communicative competence.
二、Kinds of mistakes.
First of all, I suggest that we had better prepare a notebook to collect students’ mistakes and classify these mistakes. These mistakes can be seen as evidence of the learners’ active contribution to second language acquisition, And can provide information that could be use to sequence item for teaching or to devise remedial lessons.
After classifying the mistakes, we can assign description to each of mistakes, usually we can describe them as omission, additions, misinformation and misordering. Omission means the absence of an item that must appear in a well-formed utterance. For instance: They drinking tea, in this sentence, link verb “are” is omitted. Addition means the presence of an item that must not appear in a well-formed utterance. For example: They did not went there. Misinformation means the use of the wrong form of morpheme or structure. E.g. The dog eated the duck. Misordering means the incorrect placement of a morpheme in a utterance. E.g. I very much like bananas.
From these mistakes, the teacher can also predict the stage of students’ development and when the mistakes occur and find proper ways overcome these mistakes, when the students are unaware of the existence of a particular rule in the target language, they usually make mistake like this: “She will goes to London next week.” This time we should explain the rules again and the students have a clearly understanding of the particular rules.
Some mistakes are systematic, that means, mistakes appear when the students have discovered a rule but it is the wrong one. E.g. I maked a mistake. It showed that the students have known the structure of the past tense, but he has not noticed the irregular forms of the verbs. Such kind of mistakes can be avoided by practicing. Furthermore, we should pay attention to the mistake like this: “Have they eaten?” Students make this kind of mistakes because of lacking background information. So we should tell them more western culture.
三、Skills of correcting errors.
So by classifying and describing mistakes, we know clearly where and how the mistakes are committed and can take proper ways to correct them.
1、Establishing teachers’ own system of mistake correction symbols.
① “g” stands grammar mistakes;
② “sp” stands for spelling mistakes;
③ “∧” means add sth. here;
④ “/” means omission;
⑤ “---” means the part underline is misinformation;
⑥ “～” means misordering; etc.
Then we can marks to indicate the mistakes in the students’ written exercises and let students themselves correct the mistakes. It is good for improving students’ skills of correcting mistakes.
2、Making some hints
We can use a question mark or some other signs to indicate the mistakes.
3、Face by face correction
We’d better corrects the mistakes face by face. In the class, we can select some typical mistakes to write on the blackboard, then let students correct them together or explain them. Sometimes we can ask students work in pairs or to discuss in groups. This can encourage them to improve their language.
Sometimes, we can face a few students, especially the top students and low students. When we correct top students’ mistakes, we can require them higher; the opposite, we can explain the language items more clearly to make sure they can understand.
4、Oral mistakes correction
①Non-verbal communication indicates mistakes.
e.g. When the students make mistakes, showing a frown or doubtful expression.
② Pretends to misunderstand.
e.g. S: I play football on Sunday morning.
T: Every Sunday morning.
③ Repeat what the student says and stress the wrong part.
e.g. S: He’s going in Sydney.
T: He’s going in Sydney.
④ Reformulate the wrong sentence.
e.g. S: Next week I go to Beijing.
T: Oh, next week, you are going to Beijing.
Except these ways mentioned above, we may use other ways to indicate mistakes without hurting students’ feeling.
To draw a conclusion, in English learning, students make errors constantly. But we can just make use of mistakes to be evidence of the learners’ active contribution for foreign language learning, and try to find the difficult areas of the target language and take proper ways to correcting mistakes. As a teacher, we should remember it all the time that the purpose of correcting mistakes is to let students learn well, so we should know clearly when and how to correct mistakes.
References
[1] Newspaper: 《Learning English》. Learning English Press
[2]WangZhuqin: English Teaching. Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press.