As an English teacher, whenever I have a lesson online or in a classroom, I expect my students to make mistakes, and students, in turn, expect me to correct them. Mistakes are a natural and fundamental part of learning. “By seeking and blundering we learn,” to quote Goethe. But what constitutes a mistake? More specifically, what is a grammatical mistake? In order to answer that question, I am going to tell you a story about a table. Once upon a time, a husband and a wife bought a table from IKEA. It was a beautiful, oval coffee table in walnut veneer, or it would be once they had assembled it – and if you have ever bought furniture from IKEA, you will know that it is not always easy to put it together! When the couple returned home, they took everything out of the box and lay all the pieces of wood and the screws and the bolts on the floor. It looked fairly straightforward, and so they started to assemble the table without carefully studying the instructions. Soon they realised that
The words of an English language teacher & proofreader