The Linguistic Toolkit for Teachers of English

2.2 The art of repairing

Repairing is a complex process that involves various steps. First of all, you have to notice that something is not the way it should be. Once you've done that you need to be able to analyse what is going on and you need to be able to identify the actual problem. It is only then that you can address this problem and repair the whole structure. This is true for any kind of craft just as much as it is true for language teaching. However, all analogies break down at some point, and it is at this point that our analogy is not quite accurate any more. Whenever you build something as a craftsperson all kinds of errors or mistakes are just that: errors or mistakes that need to be rectified. In a language teaching context and from a linguistic perspective errors are extremely helpful, as we will explore presently.

2.2.1 Errors and why they are a good thing

A chapter on errors might be somewhat unexpected in a book of this kind, especially this early in the book. I've decided to put it here for two reasons. Firstly, errors will be a big part of your future daily life as a teacher. You need to be able to spot an error as soon as it occurs, you need to know what exactly went wrong and you need to know how to deal with it. All of this needs to happen really fast, in a matter of split seconds. Secondly, errors are usually considered to be something bad, something that is unwanted in the classroom. It seems to show failure both on part of you as the teacher ("I have not done a good job in explaining this to my students!") and on the part of the students ("S/he still hasn't learned this!"). However, errors are actually an extremely useful resource for you as a teacher as they provide you with highly relevant information as to the extent to which your student has learned the language, or not. Take a look at the wonderful example of an exchange between the mother and her child below (Corder 1981: 11):

(1)

M:

C:

M:

C:

M:

C:

M:

C:

Did Billy have his egg cut up for him at breakfast?

Yes, I showeds him.

You what?

I showed him.

You showed him?

I seed him.

Ah, you saw him.

Yes, I saw him.

The child's utterances in the above example point at three problem areas. The first has to do with subject and verb concord and, actually, reveals two difficulties the child has. He or she makes use of the third person present tense singular -s, which is obviously not correct in this case, and the child has not yet learned that the simple past is not marked for concord. A second problem that becomes apparent concerns the lexicon, namely a confusion of the verbs to show and to see. Finally, we see an unawareness of the irregular past tense form of the verb to see.

This example also illustrates nicely what can be achieved as a teacher if we deal with errors in the right way. Had the mother merely corrected her child by saying "no, it's I showed him" only one of the three problem areas would have shown. As Corder (1981: 11) says, "simple provision of the correct form may not always be the only, or indeed the most effective, form of correction [.]. Making a learner try to discover the right form could often be more instructive to both learner and teacher."

Not only does Corder argue for a particular way of treating errors in the classroom, he also advocates a new view on errors. Errors are not some random deviation from a yet to achieve foreign language competence, but they themselves are based on rules, namely on the rules of the language system that the learner him- or herself has established so far on the basis of input encountered and teaching received. This language system is usually referred to as the learner's 'interlanguage'.

2.2.2 Interlanguage

The idea of an interlanguage interlanguage was introduced into applied linguistics and second language acquisition research by Larry Selinker (1972). It helps us to better understand the process of language learning. A learner starts from his or her first language, either referred to as 'native language' (NL) or 'mother tongue' and wants to achieve some degree of proficiency in a second language, usually referred to as 'target language' (TL). Selinker drew our attention to what happens in between these two languages. He suggested that errors are not some haphazard amalgamation of native language and target language but are the consequence of a rule system that the learner of the target language has established from the input and the teaching that they have encountered so far. This rule system Selinker refers to as 'interlanguage'. When it comes to language learning, then, we are not only dealing with two but with three language systems, namely native language, target language and, in between these two, interlanguage (see figure 1).

Interlanguage in the learner's progression from his or her native language to the target language (adapted from James 1998: 3).

So, what's the point, you might ask. What have we gained? One important advantage of looking at the language learning process in this way is a new perspective on what the learner cannot do but also on what the learner can do. Errors are not only a sign of failure, a deviation from a still to be achieved target norm, but they can also tell us a lot about what the learner has already learned. When, in example (1), the child says I seed him, this tells us that the child has already acquired the formation of the regular past tense, this piece of linguistic knowledge is part of the child's interlanguage. What is not yet part of the interlanguage is that the verb to see has an irregular past tense form. If something similar happened in your classroom, you could learn from that that you have done a good job in teaching regular past tense formation and that your student has done a good job in learning it. What still remains to be done is to make the learner aware of the exceptions to that rule, as these are not yet included in his or her interlanguage system. All of this is extremely valuable information for you as a teacher.

. let's take a look at the following two examples. The asterisk marks wrong forms, the question mark indicates that the status with regard to correctness is not clear.

(a)

This is completely *unlogical.

(b)

?No fucking way!

Try and find out what the use of the form unlogical in (a) tells us about the learner. What has he or she learned already? What about (b)? Is it wrong? Why, or why not? If yes, in which sense?

Example (a) is not what a native speaker of English would say and a form that we would like to get rid of at some point in time. Still, the form unlogical shows that the learner has already acquired some understanding of negation in English, namely that it can be done through negation prefixes and that one of these is the prefix un-. This example also illustrates the relevance and value of your linguistic expertise. If you have no idea of derivational morphology, i.e. the study of how we create new words from given words, your only option of dealing with this error is on a word basis resulting in feedback along the lines of "No, this is incorrect, you should say illogical." Compare this to the much more helpful feedback that you are able to provide if your linguistic superpowers, as it were, kick in:

The word unlogical is not quite right. What you did well is that you used a prefix to express that something is not logical. However, you used the wrong prefix. While in German the prefix un- is the correct one with the word logisch, in English the adjective logical takes another prefix, namely il-. Maybe we should take a closer look at how we can use prefixes in English to express negation in the near future.

Example (b) is a little more complicated, as it is not quite obvious whether we are dealing with an error at all. After all, (b) is an English utterance that, used in the right context and the right circumstances would be an excellent response to, say, a question or a request. In other contexts, such as a classroom context, it would usually be frowned upon and, hence, a piece of unsuccessful language use. Again, the interlanguage system of the learner shows some degree of sophistication because it contains a highly useful and highly idiomatic formula. What the language system lacks, however, are rules about the contexts in which this utterance can be used and in which it cannot be used.

I hope that the above has helped to make clear that it makes sense for you as a future language teacher to keep the concept of interlanguage in mind. It helps you to take a wider perspective on errors. Errors are not merely a sign of failure. Rather, they can provide us with information about the current state of the interlanguage system that the learner has created in their mind. Not only do errors show you where the learner has not yet achieved native-speaker status, but oftentimes they can also show you what the learner has already learned.

In this section we have...