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Error treatment in teaching English is a crucial aspect of language acquisition that focuses on how educators address and respond to learners' mistakes. Effective error treatment not only helps students recognize and understand their errors but also fosters a supportive learning environment where they feel safe to experiment with the language. By employing various strategies—such as corrective feedback, peer review, and self-assessment—teachers can guide students toward greater linguistic competence and confidence. This process encourages active engagement with the language, allowing learners to develop critical thinking skills and a deeper understanding of English grammar, vocabulary, and pronunciation.
How to Correct a Student Without Hurting Their Feelings
Stay Positive. The most important thing you want to remember when giving out correction is to keep your words and attitude positive. ...
Know When to Deliver Correction. ...
Know Your Students. ...
Don't Use Correction as Punishment. ...
Provide Examples. ...
Correct the Work Not the Child.
What is the role of error?
Making mistakes plays an important and useful part in language learning because it allows learners to experiment with language and measure their success in communicating. This unit focuses on the kinds of mistakes learners make when they speak or write a foreign language, why they make these mistakes and the part that mistakes play in language learning.
Key concepts
What are the main reasons why your learners make mistakes?
Mistakes are often categorised into errors and slips. Errors occur when learners try to say something that is beyond their current level of knowledge or language processing (working on the language unconsciously to try to understand and learn it). Usually, because they are still processing or don't know this part of the language, learners cannot correct errors themselves because they don't understand what is wrong.
Slips are the result of tiredness, worry or other temporary emotions or circumstances. We make them because we are not concentrating on what we are saying or writing. They are not a result of incomplete language processing or a lack of knowledge. They happen simply because our attention is somewhere else at that moment. These kinds of mistakes can be corrected by learners themselves, once they realise they have made them.
There are two main reasons why second language learners make errors. The first reason is influence from the learner's first language (mother tongue/L1) on the second language (L2). This is called interference or transfer. Learners may use sound patterns, lexis or grammatical structures from their own language in English.
Interlanguage is the students’ own version of the second language they speak in as they learn. Errors are a part of this as well. Students examine and restructure their interlanguage. Therefore, it is not stable. As the student’s learning expands, their interlanguage broadens and progresses. According to experts, interlanguage is a stage in language learning that is important and unavoidable. That is to say that interlanguage and errors are important when learning a language.
When learning their mother tongue, children speak their own version of it for a while. They make progress on certain language items, then regress and make errors for a period of time until they disappear at last. When they disappear, it normally happens without obvious feedback or correction.
To aid students to enhance their interlanguage error, let's consider three major methods:
Exposition to a great deal of interesting language.
Use of the language as much as possible with others.
Concentration on the forms of language.
In some cases, errors do not vanish completely. They tend to become ‘fossilised’ errors. These are errors that the students keeps on making for a long period of time or even for the rest of his/her life. This usually happens when the students (especially adults) have the ability to interact with others as necessary in a foreign language and therefore have no reason to further improve their language. Errors that are ‘fossilised’ could possibly be because the student has not had enough exposure to the second language language and/or because the student is not motivated enough to improve their accuracy level.
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