One of the false impressions created by drowning students in grammar exercises, fill-in-the-blank worksheets and multiple-choice tests is that language has right and wrong answers and that’s it. The picture you get from neat, little blanks and a 100-point grading scale is that native speakers communicate in perfectly formed, correct, error-free sentences all the time. That's a laugh. Real language, especially spoken language, is loaded with mistakes.
In fact, everyone who speaks any language does so in sloppy, stumbling, stuttering messes of linguistic mush. Much of what people say is gobbledygook. People hesitate, change words, get confused, cough, stop mid-sentence to think, and say things like, "Wait, wait…I mean…" then totally reverse the entire message they just delivered. That's just how people are—full of mistakes! If humans can be said to have a single unifying characteristic, it would be their mistake-making capacity.
You can't correct human nature in a few English classes, or even years, but some teachers try to point out everything wrong with students. They correct mistakes immediately, insistently and strictly. This might scare students into obedient silence, but it does not help them learn English. It teaches them to be afraid of mistakes, but not much more.
Mistakes are not good, but are entirely normal. Not only do adults make mistakes in what they say all the time, but just listen to kids in their first language. They make a lot of "mistakes," especially when they go through their language growth spurt, but gradually find what is more correct. During their language learning, kids can drive you crazy asking questions, forming longer and longer sentences and rambling on all day long. I sometimes wish my classes were as noisy as a bunch of three-year olds!
Instead, what I often get is silent, stony-faced young adults too afraid to speak in case they utter a mistake. English classrooms, though, should be places to make a lot of mistakes, without worry, and not have them corrected too much. From the earliest stages, though, many English classes are basically "mistake correcting" classes. Many of my college students are shell-shocked survivors of chronic correction!
Parents correct children not by scolding them, testing them, or yelling at them, but by speaking to them over and over and over. Children, teenagers and adults have brains at different stages of learning development, and so need different kinds and levels of input, but the similar point is a constant flow of language. Not worrying about mistakes lets language flow more easily. Most mistakes students make can be corrected later on as they use the language more and more. Mistakes will always happen. They are no big deal.
Mistake making can’t be changed, but the attitude towards mistakes can be. When learning a language, mistakes have a natural percentage, like missing free throws in basketball or pitches in baseball. No one thinks of missed free throws or strikes as mistakes. That’s because even the best athletes can only hit, at the very best, 80 percent free throws, and even fewer percentage of baseball pitches. While learning or practicing sports, these percentages are even lower. Sportspeople just try to get the percentages up. With language, too, mistakes do not show you do not know the language. Mistakes show you are in the game!
The famous basketball coach, John Wooden, who many consider the greatest ever, once said, "The team that makes the most mistakes is going to win!" His ten college basketball championships and an amazing 80 percent win record show that he never aimed for 100 percent at all. He understood that mistakes show how seriously you are working and are not wrong or bad, but rather are the best evidence of being active and determined. Mistakes are always part of the game, but you have to make enough of them to get to the right moves afterwards.
Language-learning mistakes are part of the game. We often laugh at speaking mistakes in everyday life because we know nothing bad will happen. They are just “words, words, words,” as Hamlet said when asked what he was reading. They can’t hurt, but they can help. A good laugh at mistakes can change the atmosphere in the classroom. A mistake-welcoming classroom ensures that the fear of mistakes does not become ingrained and harmful. In mistake-ignoring or –welcoming classrooms, learners can feel comfortable and encouraged to try to correct it on their own, or just laugh at it, forget it and move on. Connecting mistakes to laughter helps more than connecting them to shame.
The attention on what is said is more interesting than on whether it is correct or not. If a student says to me, "You is a good teacher!" I would not stop and correct the verb, but rather I would feel flattered and pleased. We can still communicate even with mistakes. Focusing on content rather than mistakes allows learning to flourish without fear, shame or self-correction. We should listen for content, not for mistakes.
Because students are always moving towards new material, they necessarily make mistakes. As they get to a new level, new mistakes occur, but the mistakes of the lower level are reduced through practice. If I describe how to get to my house in Japanese, a rather lower-level use of language, I will not make many mistakes. But if I give my opinion or ask a difficult question at my university, I probably will make mistakes, because it is at a higher level of language use. But that’s OK.
Life is too short to pay attention to all the mistakes. Sometimes, I think the world is divided into two kinds of people: those who learn from their mistakes; and those are embarrassed by them. We make too many mistakes anyway to pay attention to all of them, and the ones we do notice, we can learn from. We have to learn to love our mistakes, respect ourselves when we make them, and let plenty of mistakes flow through our lives.
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