When and what students’ mistakes spanish to english should be corrected is a very controversial issue. The answer to it depends mainly on what we consider paramount in a particular situation – the correctness of speech (accuracy) or fluency of speech (fluency). In our country, for a long time, the approach under the conditional name “fix everything and always!” dominated, which, in theory, should have contributed to the formation of impeccably correct speech, but, unfortunately, often led to the appearance of a language barrier.
Nowadays, it seems to me, the trend has softened somewhat, and we are seeing more and more recommendations to correct only significant errors, that is, those that really make it difficult to understand. Be that as it may, no one can give clear and unambiguous recommendations regarding WHAT and HOW to correct, and here teaching intuition, experience and common sense often help us out.
It is also important to distinguish between types of errors japanese to english.
But, regardless of the difference in approaches, there is a separate category of errors that must be corrected. The problem is that this can be very difficult to do. These are the so-called fossilized errors, that is, settled, fixed errors (from fossil – fossil, fossil). That is, it is a mistake that the student has made so many times that it has become part of his speech. Beginners do not have this type of mistakes, but, as they learn the language, they, unfortunately, often accumulate, and then disappear with great difficulty.
fossilized-mistakes
Based on what I have encountered in my practice, established errors are most often either grammatical or phonetic, and the latter are the hardest to deal with.
What needs to be done to get started? Draw the student’s attention to the error. It is likely that he has no idea what he is doing wrong. It is important here that the student make a conscious effort to correct the mistake and realize that it really needs to be corrected. The logic “it’s okay, but I always say so, and they understand me” is iron, but it’s worth trying to convince the opposite :).
Another situation is that the student knows that he is making a mistake, but he cannot help himself, cannot correct it, despite all your attempts to help. The fact is that he is so “related” to this mistake that the correct version seems to him incorrect, clumsy. The student can correct the mistake himself, if the teacher pays attention to it, but, with a high probability, will continue to make it in the future, especially if there is insufficient motivation to correct this mistake.
Why do such errors occur? For a number of reasons, it is difficult to single out one leader. Something arises under the influence of the native language, for example, the plural use of the words money and hair among Russian-speaking students, something is adopted from other students. Perhaps the student somewhere read / heard the wrong option, and remembered it. Or he learned the language on his own, and no one could point out his mistake. Very often, mistakes are fixed because the teacher did not correct them in time, because, perhaps, he did not notice them, or he could not pay due attention to the student when teaching in a large class.
In any case, as I wrote above, all fixed errors need to be corrected. How? It often turns out that it is long and painful :).
A few practical ideas that were once useful to me.
Listening to a speech recorded on a voice recorder works very well, it is possible with writing a transcript. Then ask the student to either correct the mistake on their own, or ask classmates / classmates to do it. If you do not have a voice recorder (although, if you wish, you can easily find one, since many, even inexpensive, mobile phones currently have this function), then you can simply write down the exact (!) quote by hand.
You can ask the student to write down what he has just said, which will allow him to better concentrate on the spoken phrase. The problem here is that for this the student’s speech will have to be interrupted, which, of course, should not be done too often, but, in the case of a particularly insidious mistake, it seems to me that it is quite acceptable.
You can make a list of the most common mistakes, and allocate time in the curriculum to work them out. As my experience suggests, in this case, non-standard, game tasks work better than regular exercises.
You can make a set of cards for each common mistake, and raise a card in class when a student makes that mistake.
In some cases it can be useful to explain why the error occurs, where it came from, especially if the error was made under the influence of the native language.
Students can keep fossil diaries in which they write down all their entrenched mistakes. Can be used for both self-study and classroom practice.
I like the idea of making a class/group wiki where each student has their own page with stuck bugs.
Do not forget that when eradicating fossilized errors, it is impossible to achieve instant results; correcting each such error requires a long time. Another important point is that such errors must be corrected one at a time, that is, first we get rid of one “fossil”, and only then move on to the next one.