Of uzbekistan fergana state university foreign languages faculty

Are errors always bad?
In a language classroom it is very obvious claim of the teacher that students will not commit errors. However, errors have some positive and constructive aspects. Such as, making errors points out that students are actively participating in the language learning process. Peter James states, "The learners know they make mistakes, but, of course, they don't know where the mistakes are, they don't know the importance of their mistakes, and even when this is explained, they repeat them". Peter's idea indicates that though students learn L2 through mistakes and errors, they are needed to be explained those errors and mistakes clearly. Then students will be promoted by their mistakes and errors for their learning of second language. Also, by making errors, students assess themselves with the variety of language and get to know about the difference between correct and incorrect language. Errors made by students help out a teacher to prepare future lessons by knowing how much new language has been absorbed and how much more practice is needed⁴ Students obviously want the English they produce to be understood and corrected. Grammatical errors, vocabulary errors and mispronounced words may affect students' ability to be understood. Students sometimes do not know that they are making errors, which need feedback from the teacher to increase their awareness. He says, "mistimed error treatment may not be helpful, and may even be harmful if it aimed at structures which are beyond the second learners in terms of their stage of interlanguage development". Sometimes ill-timed error treatment creates a major problem in students, which is called fossilization. Fossilization. One dilemma of correction is that although we know that errors are a productive aspect of language learning, learners often seek to avoid problematic language structures and consequently fail to learn difficult, but essential, linguistic patterns⁵.
Sometimes even efficient learners of a second language may have syntactic and lexical errors, which remain permanent in their speech. The speech of many language learners is characterized by the phenomenon called fossilization, which means getting permanent with a fixed system of incorrect linguistics forms. Brown has pointed out "the internalization of incorrect forms takes place by means of the same learning process as the internalization of correct forms, but we refer to the latter ... as learning while the former is called fossilization". In other words, fossilization is the regular use of noticeably incorrect forms. To clarify this term more explicitly, we can say that fossilization is the relatively permanent adaptation of incorrect linguistic forms into a person's second language competence. For example, if a learner has a problem with a specific structure of English, such as the use of 'an', he/she starts to avoid those or tries to memorize it. Furthermore, if a learner cannot overcome this mistake at an early age, it cannot be eradicated regardless of the amount of explanation and instruction he/she receives. Brown suggested a metaphor for fossilization - 'cryogenation' which means the process of freezing matter at very low temperature, which indicates viewing fossilization as unchangeable situation. However, fossilization is sometimes normal and natural stage for many learners and should not be regarded as a kind of incurable illness. While it is not known why fossilization occurs, Brown, Vigil and Oller are of the opinion that it occurs from the type of feedback second language learners receive. There are two types of feedback - the first is cognitive feedback, which delivers the information about the language a learner uses. The second is affective feedback, which is the emotional reaction in response to their utterances and Signals to the learners' desire or willingness to continue communicating. These two types and levels of feedback are listed below:
• Affective feedback
Positive: Keep talking; I'm listening
Neutral: I'm not sure I want to maintain this conversation.
Negative: This conversation is over.
• Cognitive feedback
Positive: I understand your message; it's clear.
Neutral: I'm not sure if I correctly understand you or not.
Negative: I don't understand what you are saying; it's not clear.
Give students good feedback
Good feedback is essential to correcting your students’ mistakes. Be specific and encouraging, and focus on how your students can do better next time as opposed to what they’ve done wrong. You should also provide students with the correct answer if they have answered a question incorrectly. An important pedagogical implication is that teachers should attempt to understand learners' level anxiety in a second language classroom. Teachers should be aware of how they correct students' errors and need to avoid using correction strategies that might humiliate students in front of other students in class. So, they need to be sensitive to the learners who make errors/mistakes and should deal with them in a positive manner. Teachers should create a supportive classroom environment in which their students can feel confident about expressing their ideas and feelings freely without suffering the threat or embarrassment of having each one of their oral errors corrected. Although teachers' correction of learners' errors is helpful to many students, it may not necessarily be effective technique for every student or in all language classrooms. Peer correction or self-correction with teacher's guidance may be more effective for some teachers and learners, so teachers should keep this point in mind. Teachers should educate themselves in the literature on error correction, which involves theories and practical suggestion for correcting students' errors. In our country, most of our teachers join the teaching profession without undergoing any kind of training program on teaching and they learn to teach by the method of trial and error, due to which students become the victims of ineffective teaching. Our teachers should undergo extensive teaching training programs where they need to be effectively trained in the recent teaching methodologies. A trained teacher would know how to deal with a variety of learners' errors that occur inevitably in their speech.
You can also consider telling other people in similar roles the lessons you've learned so that they can learn from your mistake. This can help avoid the same mistake occurring repeatedly in your workplace, and it can help you build relationships with your colleagues. Additionally, teaching others what you've learned can help solidify lessons in your memory. For example, if you made a mistake calculating a figure on a financial statement, you could show your coworkers in the same job where you made the mistake and how they can avoid it. Doing this can also make the workplace more efficient and productive. Reflecting on your improvement can also help you view mistakes positively as growth opportunities. You can evaluate how you've applied lessons to your life, including how you've stuck to habits. You can also think of mistakes that you continue to make to identify where you still can improve. Consider reflecting by writing in a journal or talking to someone you trust. Having a learning mindset is thinking of yourself as constantly learning. Keeping a learning mindset can help you view mistakes as lessons and growth opportunities rather than failures. Instead of dwelling on mistakes you've made, think of them as positive experiences that have helped you grow and improve. For many teens, perceived faults loom large as their self-consciousness grows. Theorist David Elkind’s classic description of an adolescent’s sense of an “imaginary audience” may not be so imaginary these days. Kids are watching each other closely both in school and online—judging, comparing, and evaluating—while mental health conditions like anxiety and depression are on the rise. Our performance-based school culture may not be helping, but there is an alternative—and it involves guiding our students to embrace the very failures they’re trying to avoid.
Giving feedback and correcting mistakes are important parts of most English teaching programs. From textbooks, videotapes and pictures to the Internet, teachers rely heavily on a diverse range of materials to support their teaching and their students’ learning. However, despite the current rich array of English language teaching materials commercially available, many teachers continue to adapt different materials for classroom use. Indeed, most teachers spend considerable time finding, selecting, evaluating, adapting and making materials to use in their teaching. In the research, we synthesized a range of ideas from the literature on materials design. We examined six factors that teachers need to take into account when considering designing teaching materials; and finally we presented ten guidelines for designing effective English teaching materials.
Discussions about the advantages and disadvantages of teacher-designed materials usually center on a comparison with using text or course books. Rather than focusing on course-books, we have turned our focus to teacher-produced materials and consider that the disadvantages of course-books can become advantages for teacher-produced materials. The key reasons why teachers may wish to produce their own teaching materials can be linked to four themes distilled from recent literature on this topic⁶. An important advantage of teacher-produced materials is contextualization. A key criticism of commercial materials, particularly those produced for the worldwide EFL market is that they are necessarily generic and not aimed at any specific group of learners or any particular cultural or educational context. The possible lack of ‘fit’ between teaching context and has been expressed thus: “Our modem course-books are full of speech acts and functions based on situations which most foreign-language students will never encounter. Appealing to the world market as they do, they cannot by definition draw on local varieties of English and have not gone very far in recognizing English as an international language, either.” For many teachers, designing or adapting their own teaching materials, enables them to take into account their particular learning environment and to overcome the lack of' fit’ of the course-book.
Another aspect of context is the resources available. Some teaching contexts will be rich in resources such as course-books, supplementary texts, readers, computers, audio-visual equipment and consumables such as paper, pens and so on. Other contexts may be extremely impoverished, with little more than an old blackboard and a few pieces of chalk. A lack of commercial materials forces teachers to fall back on their own resources and designing their own teaching materials can enable them to make best use of the resources available in their teaching context. A further aspect that is not often mentioned in the literature is the cost of commercially produced resources. For many schools, teacher-produced materials can be the best option in terms of both school and student budget.
Learn how to help kids overcome fear of failure. Discover how mindfulness can help students cope with failure. In the direct instruction group, students learned to solve complex math problems with the teacher helping them along the way. In the productive failure group, however, students struggled and failed at solving problems until the teacher stepped in to help them analyze their failed attempts and find the correct solution. As a result, the productive failure group outscored the direct instruction group on both simpler and more complex problems during a final test. Further, groups of students who demonstrated multiple approaches to solving problems were also more successful than those who did not. In addition to understanding the different ways you might err, it seems helpful to actually make errors in the first place. Be confident and be wrong: If productive failure appears to enhance learning, so does overconfidence. Multiple studies suggest that the more confident you are in the wrong answer, the more likely you will remember the right answer after you are corrected. In one study, students answered questions on a quiz and rated their confidence level in each of their answers. Then they were given feedback on their incorrect answers. Researchers discovered that students were more likely to correct their initial errors during a final test if they had been highly confident in them. Why did this happen? Researchers speculate that students focus more attention on corrective feedback when they are both confident and wrong (and perhaps surprised by their error)⁷. They also claim that when a learner expresses confidence in wrong answers, the learner’s second guess may often be the correct answer. When corrected, some students claimed that “they knew it all along.” Bottom line: If we embrace and even study errors in our classrooms, students may actually learn more. However, there is a glaring caveat here: This only works if students have the emotional resilience to respond to mistakes adaptively and flexibly. Helping students respond to perceived failure. When children worry that they are making too many mistakes or possibly failing at something, the emotional fallout can be difficult to manage. According to UC Berkeley professor Martin Covington, the fear of failure is directly linked to self-worth, or the belief that you are valuable as a person. Covington found that students will put themselves through unbelievable psychological machinations in order to avoid failure and maintain the sense that they are worthy. “If we embrace and even study errors in our classrooms, students may actually learn more” ―Dr. Amy L. Eva.
In a study of fourth to sixth graders, researchers analyzed students’ emotional responses when they made mistakes and identified three distinct styles. The “distance and displace” style (withdrawing and blaming someone else) and the “minimize and move” style (moving on and looking beyond the mistake) reflected patterns of avoidance. However, students who had the “regret and repair” style (featuring some guilt, normalizing of the situation, and self-care)⁸ engaged in less self-blame, participated more actively in problem solving with their peers, and earned greater respect from teachers. Here lies the larger challenge: How can we help kids to accept their errors and failures, particularly in school, so that they might translate this skill to the real world? Adjust the learning context: “Let’s try this another way.” In the same study of fourth to sixth graders’ mistakes, emotions, and coping strategies, researchers suggested that the context for learning may be important. Students may find it more emotionally challenging to work in a small group when they’re having difficulty, and may be better served by working privately. So consider providing options to kids who may need a little space to flounder. Encourage persistence: “Keep trying. Don’t give up!” A study demonstrates that when adults model persistence in working toward a goal, infants as young as 15 months tend to mimic that behavior. Persistence can be learned. As teachers, we have a lot of power to influence our students’ efforts by sharing our own vulnerability and identifying our own self-conscious emotions, our stops and starts during problem solving, and our commitment to keep going. Students who engaged in the “regret and repair” style of coping still felt guilt when they made mistakes, but they continued to engage and keep trying—while also being gentle with themselves. Model self-compassion: “Be kind to yourself when you’re confused; it’s okay.” If we model and normalize the ups and downs of learning with our students, we can also share the power of self-compassion. They can learn to think: “This is tough, and I don’t get it. I’m not alone here; other people get confused just like me, and I’m going to cut myself some slack; it’s okay to not know the answer right now. I can be kind to myself and know that I will find my way through this challenge.”⁹
If teachers can help their students focus on skills and strategies that enhance resilience, students will learn to cope better, recover more quickly, or at least start heading in that direction. Maybe we shouldn’t be surprised that American teachers and students tend to avoid talking about mistakes at school. However, there are good reasons to rethink our approach to mistakes so that we can help our students to ultimately benefit—both academically and emotionally. It’s okay to “mess up” and spill the milk. There is even beauty in vulnerability. It gives us space to find our strength. Knut is a psychologist and cognitive neuroscientist. He has studied how adolescent brains react to errors and surprises. He is currently studying how the brain changes physically when we practice something for a long time. Both at work and at home, Knut enjoys programming and finding new uses for virtual reality. It is like your brain knows you have made a mistake before “you” do!¹⁰ And indeed, scientists think that this is exactly what happens. The cingulate cortex compares our actual actions to what we would like to do or should achieve, and the error then signals to our conscious self that the actual action and the outcome we expected do not match. The error thus brings this error or mismatch to our attention. The actual awareness of making an error happens at the same time as a later brain signal, called the error positivity, which is an electrical signal that scientists believe to be involved in our awareness of making an error.
There are two main reasons why second language learners make errors. The first
reason is influence from the learner’s first language (L1) on the second language. This is called interference or transfer. Learners may use sound patterns, lexis or grammatical structures from their own language in English.
The second reason why learners make errors is because they are unconsciously
working out and organizing language, but this process is not yet complete. This kind of error is called a developmental error. Learners of whatever mother tongue make this kind of errors, which are often similar to those made by a young first language speaker as part of their normal language development. For example, very young first language speakers of English often make mistakes with verb forms, saying things such as “I goed” instead of “I went”. Errors such as this one, in which learners wrongly apply a rule for one item of the language to another item, are known as overgeneralization. Once children develop, these errors disappear, and as a second language learner’s language ability increases, these kinds of errors also disappear.
Errors are part of learners’ interlanguage, i.e. the learners’ own version of the second
language which they speak as they learn. Learners unconsciously process, i.e. analyze and reorganize their interlanguage, so it is not fixed. It develops and progresses as they learn more. Experts think that interlanguage is an essential and unavoidable stage in language learning. In other words, interlanguage and errors are necessary to language learning.