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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.

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