Learner Error & Teaching Secondary Languages
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The treatment and reduction of learner error has long been considered to be the primary task of the language teacher. This was seen to be readily accomplished by the judicious provision of a form of negative feedback (error correction) and the systematic reinforcement of appropriate learner responses and other teacher-desired elements of learnersĘ production. However, both classroom teachers and researchers alike have realized that what was once thought to be a rather simple and natural aspect of the learning process is indeed a complex affair that has, over the last several decades, undergone marked changes due not only to the evolvement of various methodologies and approaches used by teachers in providing language instruction, but also to the way these methodologies and approaches perceive the notion of error and its place in second language instruction. The purpose of this paper is to provide an historical overview of the established research dealing with the evolving attitudes held by educators and researchers regarding error correction and the manner in which this subject is viewed by the most commonly accepted methods and approaches employed in second language instruction.The problem of how to teach secondary languages is nearly as old as human society, for as soon as people divided themselves into groups those groups began to speak differently from each other - only then to find that they wanted to communicate. But while the need to teach and learn a language other th
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tion, either because they predate that concept or simply because such an idea was not central to the goals of the people who developed the model. (It may also reflect the fact that peopleĘs making mistakes in learning a new language was such an obvious happening as to be considered uninteresting.) However, using the basic tenets of each model or method of language acquisition, one can make reasonable deductions about how proponents of that theory would incorporate the idea of error correction.
Corder (1981) describes this long-standing, if not always explicit, recognition of the relationship between error analysis or correction and the process of teaching secondary languages:
Error analysis is both an ancient activity and at the same time a comparatively new one. In its old sense it is simply the informal and often intuitive activity of any teacher who makes use of the utterances of his pupils to assess whether they have, or have not, learnt the particular linguistic points that he has been trying to teach ū it is, in other words, an informal means of assessing and checking on a pupilĘs progress. Most teachers are perfectly well able to give an account of the typical errors made by the students who pass through their hands; they
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Some common words found in the essay are:
Richards Rodgers, Carol Herron, Chomsky White, , Affective-Humanistic Approach, Madsen Hilferty, Celce-Murcia McIntosh, Reading Approach, Direct Approach, Quintilian Erasmus, language acquisition, error correction, foreign language, rodgers 1986, richards rodgers 1986, richards rodgers, bowen madsen, secondary languages, error analysis, university press, celce-murcia mcintosh 1979, secondary language, bowen madsen hilferty, madsen hilferty 1985, idea error correction,
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Approximate Pages = 14 (250 words per page)
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