Unless they insist on it, that is unlikely to be right. I do think one of the single best ways to help a person acquire correct grammar is simply to point out their errors, and explain them in terms that they can understand. But excessive interruption to correct errors may do more harm than good. While it might preserve some notion of grammatical purity in the classroom, it hinders other valuable processes that are going on in the learner's mind while he's involved in production of the target language. He's thinking about how to start the sentence, which verb forms to use, how to connect the different ideas together, how to pronounce the less familiar words, and so on. He may also be thinking about what he's trying to say - and it's hard to pay conscious attention to form if you haven't yet worked out the content.
So it's not obvious when to correct language learners on their errors. Here are some questions to start with:
- Should minor errors ever be corrected? (I mean things like wrong prepositions, word order in questions, missing articles, etc.) If so, why?
- How much context is needed for correction of an error to be meaningful or beneficial?
- Is it ever harmful to correct language learners' mistakes?
- How often do learners even know what you're correcting them on? Is it worth checking? And if so, do you need to check every time, or just in specific cases?
- Why do learners repeat mistakes after they’ve been corrected on them?
- Does correcting learner errors actually improve the accuracy of their language production?
- If it doesn’t, what other reasons could there be to correct errors?
On
the first point, a key argument is that errors only matter insofar as
they affect communication — which would mean there’s no point in
correcting what I’ve called ‘small’ errors. If the goal is to become an effective communicator, there are lots of things
which are more important than grammatical accuracy per se (1).
Effective communication depends on clear pronunciation, appropriate word choice, ability to connect ideas logically, knowledge of the culture’s social conventions, and more. Correcting the small stuff doesn’t necessarily help
people become effective communicators. Even if it were important, there
is a view (2) that grammatical correction doesn’t even lead
to improvements in accuracy. This could be connected with general criticism of traditional approaches to teaching grammar — that is,
as a core component of a language course that can be presented without
much if any reference to meaning.
Still,
I keep correcting students. So I’ve been asking myself the final
question listed above. Why do I bother correcting them? I think it’s
important to have a good answer to this question, because it is easy to
fall into the mindset of: “I taught you this last week, so
you ought to remember it now” — and then to despair when students repeat
their mistakes. Answer (eventually) to follow.
Notes
1. Mistakes and Correction by Julian Edge is a good introduction to this topic.
2. E.g. Truscott 1996 - although I think this was only about correction of students' written work.
3. Another problem in this area is the following unpleasant paradox that I have observed in my own teaching practice and experienced as a learner:
If an error is small, it's easy to correct it without causing confusion or taking up too much time. If an error is serious, it's harder to correct by the same criteria - especially if the teacher himself isn't sure what the learner is trying to say. But: If an error is small, it doesn't benefit the learner much to be told about it, for the reasons discussed in the post above. If an error is serious, it benefits the learner a lot to be told about it. So in practice, the more you stand to benefit from an error being brought to your attention, the less likely it is that this will happen.
(I am assuming that learners are developmentally ready for and interested to hear the corrections in question - otherwise they don't benefit either way.)
