The teaching of English as a foreign language is now, in many places, expanding into primary (elementary) school settings

1.3 What to do with the mistakes

For children and adults, who learn English from the very beginning, making mistakes is part of the natural process of learning.

The first step towards deciding how to respond to mistakes is identifying them. Even for the most attentive listener, this is not always as easy as it sounds, sometimes because of the lack of a clear criterion of correctness, but sometimes also because a correct form may be incorrect in context.
Options for responding to mistakes include (21; 7):
• do nothing;
• store it away for later;
• correct it now.
Repeating, encouraging, praising and building confidence are what is needed to help a child to overcome mistakes. Avoid overtly correcting your child or you might discourage them. Tim and Marks offer to do these steps:

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  Not interrupting but waiting for the end of what the speaker is saying if it's something short, or a suitable pause if it's longer.
  
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  Interpreting the intention and the nature of the incorrectness. Asking for clarification may be the only way of finding out in some cases; in other cases the intention will become clear from the broader context.
  
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  Indicating that there's a mistake. Teachers often have non-verbal signals for this. Sometimes it's important to acknowledge the general correctness, or factual validity, of what the learner has said before focusing on the mistake, so as to avoid giving the message that everything the speaker said was wrong.
  
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  Indicating where the mistake is, if it can be localized. Some teachers count off the words of an utterance on their fingers, and stop at the one where the mistake is. Others repeat the utterance up to the mistake, perhaps including the mistake in a questioning tone of voice.
  
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  Giving a model of the correct version.
  
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  Telling the learner what to do, e.g. Change the tense, Make it less formal.
  
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  Asking questions to check understanding of a structure or lead the speaker to use the correct one.
  
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  Appealing to another learner, or to the whole class, for a correction. Sometimes it happens anyway.
  

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  Giving an explanation of what's wrong and why.
  

Other techniques that you can use are:

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  Don't correct, 'model' the correct form of the language. So if your child says «The boy wented home,» you can say, «Yes. The boy went home. What did he do then?»
  
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  Encourage children to correct themselves, this will build confidence and deepen the learning process. Say «Almost right, try again…» or show the child where the mistake is but do not give them the answer.
  
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  Some correction is okay but be careful not to over-correct. A page full of crossing out and corrections can be very demotivating, as is always being told, «Wrong! Do it again!»
  
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  Particularly in speech it is much better to let the child develop their ideas and fluency than to keep interrupting with corrections. The ideas are more important than the grammar.
  
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  Keep their age and level of English in mind. Give lots of praise and encouragement for every effort – they can't know everything.
  

It is very important in speaking language. If a teacher interrupts a child regularly, because he makes mistakes, the child can stop speaking and can be afraid to speak at all. And an adult will feel ill at ease and humiliating, when a teacher always correct his mistakes, and interrupt him.
The aim of this chapter was to show the different attitudes to learning English from a child’s and an adult’s sides. In the next chapter there will be describing some methods of teaching English speaking to beginners.

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