Skip to main content

Making Mistakes

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 something was wrong. The legs of the table were not straight. They looked at the instructions and saw that they had used the wrong type of screw.

Speaking another language is a bit like assembling furniture. You know that words go together in certain ways, but in order to express yourself effectively, you need to use grammar – the instructions which tell you how to properly form a sentence. Often I hear someone say, for example, “I very like chocolate.” It is perfectly understandable, of course, but a native speaker of English does not use the word 'very' in this way. If you want to know the reason for this, it is because 'very' modifies adjectives and adverbs only, so the phrase 'very much', or 'really', sounds better here. Better still would be “I like chocolate very much,” with the adverbial phrase placed at the end of the sentence.

In my opinion, the grammar of a language is a set of instructions rather than a set of rules – rules imply a penalty when they are broken, but there are no penalties when it comes to learning a language; there are only opportunities to learn. It is my job as a teacher to make people aware of the instructions, and to show them how words go together. It is not my job to act as a police officer and penalise students for “breaking the rules”.

Anyway, let us return to the story. Did the couple manage to assemble their table from IKEA? After consulting the instructions again over coffee, they succeeded in putting all the right screws in all the right places, and they now have a beautiful, oval coffee table standing in their living room.


The End.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Robots Are Coming

Much has been written recently about AI and its potential to profoundly alter the course of human history. Such warnings tend to evoke a certain science fiction film in which humanity fights for survival in a future world dominated by machines. But if I can divert your attention away from the Terminator franchise for a few moments, I'd like to present you with some research on artificial intelligence in the world of ELT. In a recent survey conducted by the British Council , teachers were asked if they agreed with the statement “AI and automated translation will eventually make learning languages unnecessary.” Reassuringly, a significant majority disagreed. Teachers' jobs seem safe for now, although some private schools in Europe may have seen a drop in the number of students of late, probably due to the economic climate. The way I see it, AI offers more opportunities to improve speaking and writing, in addition to what a flesh-and-blood teacher does. Furthermore, teachers can u...
Post a Comment
Read more

Monolingualism in Britain

In 2016, the UK was chosen as the worst country in Europe at learning other languages. Coincidentally, that was also the year in which 17 million people voted to leave the European Union in the Brexit referendum, triggering a political earthquake that continues to be felt today. Politics aside, though, why are Britons notoriously bad at learning another language? It's not an easy question to answer, but in this post I will attempt to do just that. Anyone who has watched the first episode of the Netflix series “Red Rose” will have seen a group of sixteen-year-old school leavers in the north of England celebrate not having to endure any more “boring” French lessons. This scene stayed with me, one reason being that I, on the contrary, enjoyed learning French at school, although there were times when I was expected to memorise long lists of verb conjugations, a rather dull process that is best avoided, in my opinion. Schools in the UK now allow pupils to opt out of modern languages a...
Post a Comment
Read more

Introducing Shakespeare

A train threads its way through the darkening suburbs of Liverpool as bright orange flames leap up from people's gardens. It's Bonfire Night, and my fellow drama students and I are going to see Macbeth at the Royal Court Theatre. There's some excited chatter about the prospect of seeing Pete Postlethwaite in the lead role. Other than that, my memories of that evening are rather blurry, hardly surprising when you consider that it was more than twenty-five years ago. For anyone not familiar with English customs, Bonfire Night takes place annually on the fifth of November and commemorates the failed plot to destroy the Houses of Parliament in 1605. It is believed that William Shakespeare's play Macbeth was performed for the first time in 1606, so it's quite possible that the famous playwright was working on it when Guy Fawkes, a chief conspirator in the Gunpowder Plot, was discovered in a cellar underneath Parliament along with dozens of barrels of gunpowder. Natural...
Post a Comment
Read more