This article is provided to help teachers in raising awareness and developing sensitivity in correcting errors, to encourage them to develop a positive attitude to their students’ errors and demonstrate ways of how to correct errors in teaching practice. One of the responsibilities of a teacher is to give feedback to learners. Giving feedback the teacher facilitates the learners’ evaluation of their success and progress. At various stages of language learning students make mistakes. Is it good or bad? By making errors learners are testing out their ideas about the language – they are experimenting. So, making errors is part of the learning process: by receiving feedback students get to know the difference between correct and incorrect language, they see what to focus on. Why do they make mistakes? It is caused by many reasons. The most common one is the students’ own language. A good example occurs when students make mistakes in word order. Grammatical consideration matters too. The learners often have problems with the use of articles, tenses, prepositions.

Task 1. Write down some mistakes that your learners make when they speak a foreign language. What mistakes do they make (pronunciation, grammar, vocabulary errors, word order)? Why do you think they make mistakes? What causes them? Fill in the chart. Some are done for you.

1. Lack of clarity

Incorrect: Prehistoric people used many inorganic substances difficult to find at archaeological sites, which included clay and rock.

Correct: Prehistoric people used many inorganic substances, including clay and rock, which are difficult to find at archaeological sites.

Sentences can be confusing for many different reasons. In the previous example, too many phrases come between the pronoun and its antecedent. As a result, the pronoun reference gets confusing. This can happen even if the intervening material is logically related to the rest of the sentence, as is the case here.