UNIT 11 THE ROLE OF ERROR

I have learnt that errors are another important part in the language learning process, because through the commitment of errors, students will encourage to pay attention to their own progress and to achieve day by day their goal to learn a second language.

Of course, there are some reasons why students make errors during their learning process: Interference that is the use of features of the mother tongue into the target language production. According to this factor a teacher can submerge the students in a series of language exercises to avoid doing the same errors like the use of False Cognates to overcome Interference.

Next, we have Developmental Errors which are really normal for any kind of learner. It occurs while a student is experimenting or using the language in the way he/she can. The teacher must use strategies to overcome this problem. Teachers can prepare exercises about the Past Tense of Regular and Irregular verbs to avoid students´ overgeneralization of the grammatical rules for this part of English grammar. Moreover, it is necessary to mention that there are some errors that cannot be easily eliminated, as a result of this fact it is produced Fossilization when learners do not have communicative reasons to improve their language.

Even there exist those reasons to commit errors it is possible to generate opportunities to let them out if students are exposed all the time to the target language to acquire it conscious and unconsciously. Encourage students to use the language in their interactions during the English classes and Focus on Form which is the job of the teacher to explain.

-Please go to the following links for more information:

 http://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/blogs/admin/problem-linguistic-interference-tefl

http://www.eduinnova.es/mar2010/how_to_deal.pdf 

http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/wells/interference.htm

Bibliography:

-English Phonetics, Journal of the English Phonetic Society of Japan, 3.9-21 (2000).