Mistake Correction

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istake correction

K e it h J o h n s o n

The aim of this article1is to explore what a particular view of languagelanguage learning and language teaching suggests with regard to aspecific language-teaching problem - he problem of what to do whenstudents get things wrong.

Language a s s k i The particular view of language, of language learning, and of languageteaching that is presented in this article is one which is prepared to make aparallel between language and other complex skills like playing tennis,piloting an aircraft, or playing a musical instrument. The justification forsuch a parallel is that all these behaviours, including language use, involveperforming complex sequences of activities. The type of knowledge theperformer needs to develop for all these behaviours, including languageuse, is knowledge concerned with how to (what Anderson 1980 calls pro-cedural knowledge), rather than knowledge about (what he calls declara-tive knowledge). The knowledge of a skilled language user and theknowledge of a skilled oboe player have in common that they both involveforms of procedural knowledge.

The view of language as skill, of language acquisition as skill acquisition,and of language teaching as skill training, will offend many, who may findthe comparisons this article makes between language learning and learning(for example) how to ride a horse, inappropriate if not offensive. The viewcertainly needs more justification than can be given here.2 What may besaid here is that it is by no means a new view, though it is one which hasgone rather out of fashion in recent years (hence perhaps feelings ofinappropriateness and offence). It has gone out of fashion doubtless largelythrough the influence of Chomsky and the view that language is uniqueamong human behaviours, acquired in a unique way by means of alanguage-specific acquisition device (the LAD) which does not appear tocontribute much towards the acquisition of other, non-linguistic skills. Thisview of language as unique and uniquely acquired strongly suggests that ifwe wish to know anything about how languages are learned, we shall get nouseful information from looking at how other skills are learned. Accordingto this view, the proper study of language acquisition is indeed languageacquisition.

Of course, this Chomskyian view both can be and has been challenged.As Anderson (1980:398) says: little direct evidence exists to support theview that language is a unique system. And once language is deprived of itsunique status, then the acquisition of skills other than language becomes anarea of study likely to be of interest to the language teacher. Under theChomskyian influence, such interest has waned somewhat; this article is

part of an attempt to show how looking at language learning in terms ofskills may be fruitful in both theoretical and practical terms.

ELT Journal Volume 42/2April 1988 Oxford University Press 1988 a9

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F e e d b a c k The concept of feedback is central in the literature on skill acquisition. It isrecognized that though there is a place in training for initial guidance inskill learning? there is also an important place for feedback (viewed as theprovider of information, rather than as a reinforcer). It seems intuitivelytrue that a great deal of learning how to serve in tennis for example, comesafter any initial guidance the teacher might give, when the learner picks up

the ball, serves, and notes the outcome. The sequence of events, in this case,is not learn - perform but learn - perform - learn. This sequencecorrectly suggests that when we speak about feedback, we are speakingabout something that potentially contributes to the learning process. Forlengthy discussion on the concept of feedback, see Annett (1969).

Though the situation is better today, much language teaching of the pastexemplifies the learn - perform sequence. We teach, and the studentslearn; they then perform, exemplifying, we hope, the learning that hastaken place. During or following performance, error correction is used toplug the holes. But approaching language teaching as skill training sug-gests that feedback may have more of a role to play. A central aim of this

article is to suggest that more attention should be given to the issue of howwe can best provide feedback.

That more attention needs to be given to this issue is further suggested bywhat most teachers will see as the comparative failure of the feedbackmeasures we employ. Our students leave the s off the third singular of thesimple present; we put it back on for them, and at the next opportunity theyleave it off again. One of my problems as a novice horse rider is that I leanforward on the horse; the teacher tells me to sit up straight; a moment later Iam leaning forward again. In these cases our methods of feedback do notseem to meet with much success.

E r r o r s a n d m i s t a k e s To consider how things might be improved, we might begin by asking whyit is that students get things wrong. There are at least two reasons.3 One isthat the student either does not have the appropriate knowledge, or hassome false knowledge. He or she may either not know how a tense of Englishworks, or have the wrong idea. In this case, we may say that the studentsinterlanguage knowledge is faulty. The result is what Corder (1981) calls anerror.

There is, however, a second reason for a student getting somethingwrong. It may be a lack of processing ability. I know I should not lean forwardon the horse, and when simply trotting round the paddock I do not do so.My problem comes when approaching a small jump. My feet may fall out of

the stirrups, the horse may begin to get difficult, and one result (there maybe other more painful ones ) is that I lean forward. It is not my knowledgethat is at fault here; it is my ability to perform my competence (the phraseis taken from Ellis 1985a) in difficult operating conditions. The result iswhat Corder (1981) calls a mistake.

In recent years a number of writers, dealing with different areas in thelanguage learning/teaching field, have made distinctions which can berelated to Corders between errors and mistakes. Bialystok (1982), forexample, takes the area of language testing as her starting point. Sheobserves that we have tended to assess language mastery quantitatively,providing statements that the learner simply knows more or less of the

language, or knows some of the formal properties and not others (p. 181).But we should also, she argues, ask qualitative questions, about the condi-tions under which these formal properties can be correctly manipulated.4

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Two examples, one from a non-linguistic skill and one from languageuse, will illustrate. A footballer may, in normal circumstances, be a goodgoal scorer. But when we assess his mastery, we will need to take intoaccount circumstances which are far from normal. Can he, for example,score in the Mexico World Cup, at an altitude of six thousand feet, against agood side, knowing that spectators at home will bay for the blood of the

defeated? Similarly, when we come to judge a students linguistic ability, wewould be foolish to pronounce that she has mastered the present perfecttense simply on the grounds that she has managed to use it correctly in agap-filling task, done under ideal conditions. Can she, one would need toask, use the tense correctly over a bad intercontinental telephone line, withall attention focused on getting the message across in the shortest possiblespace of time?

Returning now to the error/mistake distinction, having noted that it isone manifestation of a more general distinction between knowledge andprocessing ability one might claim that we have paid more attention inlanguage teaching to errors than to mistakes. What is less arguably true is

that techniques (like, perhaps, explanation) for handling errors springmore readily to mind than techniques for handling mistakes. It may furtherbe the case that we have tended to treat mistakes as if they were errors.Since the two are different, it seems likely that they will need to be handledin different ways.

Corder (1981: 10) argues that mistakes are of no significance to theprocess of language learning. But if we use the word mistake to describe amalformation due to inability to process under difficult sets of operatingconditions, then it is likely that a good percentage of our students malfor-mations are mistakes and not errors. If this is the case, the subject of mistakecorrection becomes an important one in language teaching.

M i s t a k e c o r r e c t i o n How can mistakes be eradicated? One might propose that in order toeradicate a mistake, a student will need at least four things. These are:

a. The desire or need to eradicate the mistake. It is likely that a number ofmistakes do not get eradicated simply because students know they can getby without eradicating them. The simple present s (which has littlecommunicative value) probably falls into this category.5

b. An internal representation of what the correct behaviour looks like. Thestudent needs, in other words, the knowledge that makes the malforma-tion a mistake and not an error. It is unlikely, of course, that the knowledgeis possessed in a form in which the linguist will possess it; which is why it isreferred to here as an internal representation (begging the question ofwhat that internal representation will look like).

c. A realization by the student that the performance he or she has given isflawed. The learner needs to know that a mistake has occurred. Some formof feedback will provide this.

d. An opportunity to repractise in real conditions.

In learning how to serve in tennis, then, the learner who has just servedbadly needs (a) a desire to serve properly, (b) to know what a good service

looks and feels like, (c) a realization that the service was bad, and (d) thechance to practise again.

This article will not deal with the first of these conditions, important

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though it is. It will consider how the remaining three might be provided inthe classroom.

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Providing internal Initial guidance should help the student to form an internal representationrepresentation of what the behaviour is like (for example, how a particular structure

operates and is used in English). How such guidance is best given is anotherarea where the skills literature has much to offer. There is extensivediscussion (for instance, in Holding 1965) on the relative merits of explana-tion and demonstration, and a look at the techniques used by trainers ofnon-linguistic skills is likely to offer the language teacher exciting and freshperspectives. There is, for example, the Suzuki method of violin playingwhere the learner is at an early age saturated with violin music, providingan internal representation of the behaviour which can be proceduralizedlater. A further method is discussed in Gallwey (1971) where it is suggestedthat learning to become a good tennis player may be helped by mimickingthe movements and even the idiosyncracies of a great player. Pretending toby Jimmy Connors may in part help one to play tennis like JimmyConnors. Full discussion of initial guidance techniques is beyond the scopeof this article, but there is much wisdom to be gleaned from the practices ofthe skill trainer.

Though initial training may help to provide internal representation,much can also be done after the event - after, that is, the learners haveperformed the behaviour for themselves. One technique which modelsafter the event is reformulation. This technique, discussed by Levenston(1978), Cohen (1983), and Allwright et al. (1984), is usually used for theteaching of writing. There are several versions of reformulation, but thebasis is that a native speaker rewrites a student essay, as far as possiblepreserving the intended meaning. Reformulation is different from recon-struction, which is what most of us do to student essays. In reconstruction,errors and mistakes are simply corrected. The result will be sentences freefrom gross malformations, but ones which may not remotely resemblesentences a native speaker would produce to express the same content.Because reconstruction focuses on errors and mistakes, it may well providethe learner with information on where he or she went wrong. What refor-mulation offers, and reconstruction fails to offer, is information on how aproficient speaker would have said the same thing. Reformulation providesa model of what the behaviour should look like; and though its clearest useis for writing, there is no reason why spoken language should not bereformulated.6

Realization of flawed It is interesting to note that according to Bartlett (1947:879), maybe theperformance best single measure of mental skill lies in the speed with which errors are

detected and thrown out .... Knowing what has been done wrong (andwhat to do about it) is something which, for example, distinguishes theskilled tennis player from the novice. Six points will be made about thisstage:

1 It cannot automatically be assumed that the learner will be aware ofhaving made a mistake. The very conditions which produce the mistakemay prevent its detection. The fact that I have so many things to attend toat the jump, on a difficult horse, with feet out of the stirrups, may make melean forward; it may also prevent me from knowing that I have leaned

Keith Johnson

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forward. Therefore some positive action needs to be taken to make meaware.

2 The positive action of being told by the teacher is probably not enough.Learners seem to need to see for themselves what has gone wrong, in theoperating conditions under which they went wrong. There are various waysof achieving this. My leaning forward on the horse is brought home bestwhen I see a video of myself doing it. As a second best, it is useful for me tosee others making the same mistake in the same conditions; and whereother learners are not available, teachers often provide the information bymimicking the learner to indicate what is being done wrong. Monitoringyourself in difficult operating conditions suggests putting classroom lan-guage on tape or video.

3 Explanation is probably not the best way to give mistake feedback.There is evidence in the skills literature (for example, in Holding 1965) thatexplanation is a procedure to be used warily anyway. Performance can bepositively harmed by elaborate explanation, as when the tennis coach

provides a lengthy lecture on how to hold the racket during service; theresult may simply be to inhibit the novice who, trying to serve, attempts tobear in mind all the points of the explanation (cf. Gallwey 1971). One mightfurther argue that any benefit that explanation might provide would be forerrors rather than mistakes. The defining characteristic of a mistake is thatthe student knows what should be done; explanation could therefore beseen as providing what he or she already has.

4 It may again be that the best way of providing the necessary realization isby confronting the learner with the mismatch between flawed and modelperformance. This again points to reformulation. I want to see what theteacher looks like going over the jump on a difficult horse (i.e. in full operatingconditions - -the importance of this will be touched on later), then to comparethis with what I looked like, in fuU operating conditions.

5 When reformulation takes place, it may be that the most useful feedbackcomes from those areas of mismatch which students are themselves able toidentify, because those areas will accord with the stage of their skill (orinterlanguage) development. A further example from riding; I was havingproblems doing a good trot, and the teacher was demonstrating what itshould look like. During her demonstration, I noticed something about theposition of her legs which she had never drawn my attention to; it was noton her teaching programme. Once I held my legs in the same position,

several of the things which I was getting wrong and which she had drawnmy attention to suddenly became right. In that situation I was learningsomething she had not set out to teach. Language teachers may find in theirexperience similar examples of where point learned is at odds with inten-ded teaching point; one of the benefits of reformulation is that if, withoutcomment, one merely presents students with a model performance to becompared with their flawed performance, it is left up to them to note andlearn what they will from the comparison.

6 But in conjunction with (5) above a further point needs to be made.There is one sense in which language skill is like ice skating. In ice skating,learning the rudiments of surviva l -being able to stand up, move forward,turn etc., without falling over - s a comparatively small part of becomingan accomplished performer. A large part of the task involves learning to


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conform to an accepted model, established over time by tradition, of whatgood skating looks like. In terms of getting by on ice many details of theaccepted model (how the legs and body should be held, for example) aremere frills. The same is true of language, and the rudiments of linguisticsurvival can be met by a form of pidgin. The learner who says Please givebeer is unlikely to go thirsty; but he or she will have failed to conform to

externally imposed norms about language behaviour, norms which in puresurvival terms are frills. The skills literatures distinction between intrinsicand extrinsic feedback (cf. Annett 1969) is relevant here. Intrinsic feed-back, springing from the situation itself, is likely to provide information onwhether the rudiments of survival have been met; it occurs when the skaterfalls over or the learner fails to get his beer. But such feedback is unlikely toprovide information on whether externally imposed norms have beenadhered to. For this, extrinsic feedback (from an outside source) is needed,and to provide it the teacher will find it necessary to draw consciousattention to mistakes and errors.7

Opportunity to practise The sequence being discussed in this article is one of mistake occurrenceagain in real operating - corrective action - retrial. There is some evidence in the skill

conditions literature (e.g. Annett 1969) that the relationship between the second two isimportant. In terms of time: for example, it may be more important howsoon retrial takes place after corrective action than how soon after mistakeoccurrence corrective action occurs. We therefore need to speak not justabout feedback after performance, but also about feedback before retrial.

It seems important that real operating conditions should be present inretrial. The following exemplifies why, first in relation to a non-linguisticskill, then in relation to language.

A novice pilot may well be able to land in clear weather when the plane

has no mechanical defects. The problem may be landing the plane in fogand when the flaps are not working correctly. In this situation, to practiselanding in clear skies in a perfect plane is clearly of restricted value. Whatthe pilot needs to practise is, precisely, landing in fog with faulty flaps. Forthis an aircraft simulator is provided. What the simulator offers is variousconfigurations of operating conditions.

The student may be able to form the present perfect correctly in a gap-filling task. His or her problem may be with getting it right over theintercontinental telephone line referred to earlier. In this situation, simplygiving more gap-filling tasks is of as restricted a value as landing in clearweather. What the learner needs is some form of present perfect simulator

which will vary the operating conditions, to simulate just those types ofconditions which are presenting difficulties.

What does a present perfect simulator look like? Perhaps work like thatof Brown et al. (1984) - which may be interpreted as an attempt to identifysome parameters of difficulty in operating conditions - will provide a wayof grading tasks in terms of operating condition complexity. Whether or notthis is so, it is clear that in important respects, free practice offers a form ofpresent perfect simulator.8 What free practice provides is ready-made setsof operating conditions; these will vary from moment to moment, and willplace variable demands on the learners ability to process. Sometimes theinteraction will require speedy response, sometimes not; different interac-tions will involve different amounts of language; the demands of message(and hence the degree of attention the learner must give to what he or she issaying rather than how he or she is saying it) will change. There will be other

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types of variation, not least in affective conditions (the degree of anxietyfelt, attitude towards interactant, etc.) which will affect the performersprocessing efficiency. Bad conditions along parameters like these are thelanguage users equivalents of fog and faulty flaps. Free practice will go along way towards simulating, over time. the operating conditions in whichmistakes occur.

The stages of corrective action and retrial are both seen as crucial tomistake eradication. It is optimistic to suppose that once corrective actionhas been taken, a mistake (as opposed perhaps to an error) will disappear.Part of learning to land in fog involves landing in fog; part of learning to usethe present perfect on an intercontinental phone involves phoning intercon-tinentally and using the present perfect. It is, however, equally optimistic tosuppose that retrial alone will efficiently eradicate mistakes. Both stages areseen as necessary but not, taken alone, sufficient for mistake eradication tooccur.

C o n c l u s i o n This article begs many questions. It may be said merely to switch the focus

of attention from initial learning to feedback. The question of how toprovide successful feedback is no less perplexing than the question of how tofacilitate successful initial learning. But perhaps a willingness to pursue themetaphor of language learning as skill learning will provide interesting newperspectives on both these questions and many others. Received January 1987

N o t e s

1 This article arose out of talks I gave at the Univer-sity of Lancaster and at Ealing College of HigherEducation. Many useful points made during discus-

sion after these talks have been incorporated intothis version.

2 Johnson (1986) attempts to provide such ajustification.

3 This point is made by Bialystok and SharwoodSmith (1985), who use the terms knowledge and con-tro to describe the distinction discussed here. SeeNote (4) below for further reference to their work.

4 Many of the issues discussed in this article directlyrelate to issues arising in the literature on variabilityin interlanguage - e.g. in Tarone (1982 and 1983).Bialystok (1982). Ellis (1985b) and Bialystok and

Sharwood Smith (1985), among others. It is by nomeans the case that all these researchers wouldsupport the position being developed here. Thisposition is closest to Bialystok and SharwoodSmiths, though they avoid association with anygeneral model of skill acquisition. specifically theone which informs this article - he model of Ander-son (1982). For discussion of interlanguage vari-ability within Andersons framework for skillacquisition, see Johnson (forthcoming).

5 The literature on pidginization and fossilizationcontains relevant discussion on this point. See Smith(1972) for the idea that pidgins are simplified andreduced because used for restricted functions.Selinker and Lamendella (1978) discuss the occur-

rence of fossilization when communicative needs arebeing adequately met.

6 The suggestion that reformulation might be used forspoken language does raise some practical, logistical

problems which would need discussion.7 This similarity between language and ice skating

was pointed out to me by Dick Allwright, whose

comments on a number of points made in this articleare gratefully acknowledged.

8 The term free practice is here intended in a generalsense to refer to the kinds of activity which Byrne(1976) associates with the production stage. Acentral characteristic of such practice is that learn-ers are given considerable freedom to choose whatthey say and when they say it. Many kinds of roleplay and simulation exercises are free practice in

this sense.

References

Allwright R. L. M-P. Woodley and J . M. All-wright. 1984. Investigating Reformulation as aPractical Strategy for the Teaching of AcademicWriting. Paper presented at the BAAL AnnualGeneral Sleeting, September 1984.

Anderson J . R. 1980. Cognitive Psychology and Its Impli-cations. San Francisco: W. H. Freeman.

Anderson J . R. 1982. Acquisition of cognitive skill.Psychologiral Review 89/4: 369-406.

Annett J . 1969. Feedback and Human Behaviour.Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.


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