By Mr. Abdellah Sallou
It Is said that making mistakes and errors are signs of learning. Our students usually make errors whenever they express themslves orally or In writing. So this is an effective strategy for teachers to evaluate their teaching and learniners to make hypotheses and discover their mistakes.
The cognitive approach sees errors as a clue to what is happening in the mind of the learner. They are seen as natural phenomenon that must occur as learning languages takes place, before grammar rules are internalized.
Which error to correct? First of all there is a difference between a mistake and error. A mistake can be easily corrected by the learner himself after revising his piece of writing. So review and rereading is of crucial importance. As for error is not within the student's conciousness, S/he is not aware of it yet, therefore S/he needs someone to correct.
There are two types of mistakes to correct: The global mistake and the local one; the global mistake deals with that one which hinders communication; meaning that the sense of the sentence is completely dostorted e.g. word order is incorrect or the use of the connectives.
The local mistake is just the distortion of a single element like verb, tenses, articles, auxilliaries and so on.
For example: these are mistakes my students made, Identify and analyse them:
1-"I watch of Tv the film very dramatic and tragedie about of the two friends."
2-"In my village the more people complain about a lot of the problems of the environment."
3-"Newday technology became very necessary thanks to contribute in making easy life."
4-"Withou any problem that take many form in anything they need to use."
So these are real exapmle of students errors and mistakes in their writing (2nd year bacc)
What do you notice? Can you identify the global mistakes from the local ones? (to be continued)
HOW TO CORRECT MISTAKES?
