Tuesday's Tip for Language Learning #27: Tactics and Strategies - Making Errors
Excerpt from Think Yourself into Becoming a Language Learning Super Star
Making Errors
Making Errors
Good learners make mistakes
and errors. Lots of them. They are risk-takers, and risk-takers take missteps.
An important difference between good learners and poor learners is that good learners
embrace mistakes and learn from them whereas poor students are afraid to make
mistakes, try to avoid them, generally make more from nervousness, and end up
both speaking less and failing to develop good speaking skills.
In gaining control over your
mistakes, understanding the difference between mistake and error is critical. Mistakes occur when you produce
something that is not correct by accident; you know how it should be said or
written, but you experience a brain glitch so that out slips a misspelling, a wrong
form, or a wrong word. Errors occur
when you don’t know how something should be said or written, and you guess
wrong.
Both mistakes and errors
are a natural part of developing greater proficiency. The greatest difficulty,
though, is that you cannot adjust your speech if you do not know you are making
a mistake. Therefore, you need the help of your teacher or a native speaker.
Strategies
You do have some control
over how you use that help. You also have control over how you react to making
mistakes. This may be an area where you have to become your own best motivator
and cheerleader.
Here are some strategies
to think about:
·
Decide that risk-taking will be the new
you, and that by the end of the course, you will be almost comfortable with
making mistakes.
·
Determine that you will track your errors,
not in order to reduce the number but in order to increase the complexity of
the language where they occur. Be happy to see your errors being reflected in
more sophisticated language than earlier.
·
While it is impossible, to eliminate
mistakes completely, make a plan (a list of tactics) that will reduce the
number of mistakes you make with the intent of being wiser about mistakes
before the course ends.
errors
from risk-taking = good learner
Tactics
If you make errors, you
need your teacher’s help. Think about how you might go about getting it. If you
make mistakes, that is on you. You need to put some tactics into place that
will help you reduce your mistakes.[1]
Here are some tactics
that might help.
·
Pay attention. Errors occur when you fail
to pay attention to the forms of language (spelling, endings, particles,
prefixes,) while you are learning them. If you fail to learn them correctly,
then you are bound to make errors. By focusing more deliberately on all aspects
of words, grammar, and expressions when you first meet them, you are less
likely to make errors later.
·
Monitor yourself. Mistakes occur when you
fail to pay attention to the forms of the language as you speak or write. If
this happens a lot,[2]
you may need to build a monitor. You can do this by rewriting your essays once
you teacher has corrected them so that you practice writing correctly. (Seems
dull, but it will improve the accuracy of your writing.) If you are making a
presentation or doing a role play, record it on your cell phone, find your
mistakes (don’t worry about finding your own errors—you can’t; your teacher
will need to point them out), confirm with your teacher, then re-do the
presentation as many times as it takes to speak without mistakes. After a
while, you will start to sense when you are about to make a mistake and stop
yourself. That may make you seem like you are speaking worse, with a lot of
false starts. Ultimately, your brain will “get it” and stop you from making the
mistake before your start to say it.
·
Avoid direct translation. Errors happen
when you try to reproduce something in the foreign language that you know in
your native language but have not yet learned in the foreign language so you
try to say the same thing in the same way through direct translation—and find
out it is wrong after the fact.[3] Instead of trying to
translate, paraphrase. (If you know a related language, e.g. you are studying
Portuguese but already speak Spanish, chances of surviving a direct translation
are higher.)
pay attention and/or
monitor = cleaner speech
[1]
Learning style preferences play a role in who makes mistakes the most. Synoptic
leaners tend to make a lot of mistakes whereas ectenic learners make much
fewer. The two kinds of leaners, described in the next section, have different
strengths and weaknesses. In the area of mistakes, the synoptic learners are
the ones who struggle the most. For more information about learning style
differences, check out works by Ehrman and Leaver (2002), Leaver (1997, 2019),
and Ehrman, Leaver, and Oxford (2003).
[2]
This happens a lot more frequently with synoptic learners (see the next section
of this book).
[3] This happens a lot with ectenic learners (see the next section of this book).
See more posts about/from this book.
See more posts about language learning.
See more Tuesday tips.
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