Looking at some typical teaching mistakes

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LOOKING AT SOME TYPICAL TEACHING MISTAKES

G.M. Frolova PhD (Pedagogy), Prof.

Head of Foreign Language Teaching Department

Annotation

educational teaching mistake teacher

Lesson observation and error correction are an important part of foreign language teacher development. The article looks at the typical teaching mistakes committed by inexperienced teachers, as well as by teachers who think they have been teaching too long to learn any new techniques or to give up their `old tricks' irregardless of their efficiency. Special attention is paid to the educational value of teacher-student interaction in the foreign language classroom, which, the author maintains, is very often neglected.

Key words: foreign language teacher development; teaching mistake; teacher-student interaction in the foreign language classroom.

Аннотация

Г. М. Фролова кандидат педагогических наук, профессор заведующая кафедрой лингводидактики

ИСПРАВЛЯЕМ ТИПИЧНЫЕ МЕТОДИЧЕСКИЕ ОШИБКИ ПРЕПОДАВАТЕЛЯ ИНОСТРАННОГО ЯЗЫКА

Наблюдение за учебным процессом и коррекция допущенных методических ошибок являются важнейшей составляющей повышения профессиональной квалификации преподавателе иностранного языка. Статья посвящена обобщению типичных методических ошибок, допускаемых начинающими преподавателями иностранного языка или преподавателями, которые считают себя достаточно опытными, чтобы продолжать учиться, совершенствоваться, а иногда и отказываться от привычных приемов обучения, без учета их эффективности. Особое внимание уделяется лингводидактическому потенциалу иноязычного взаимодействия преподавателя и студентов на занятии иностранного языка, что, как подчеркивает автор, не всегда получает должное внимание.

Ключевые слова: профессионально-методическая подготовка преподавателя иностранного языка; методическая ошибка; иноязычное взаимодействие на занятии иностранного языка.

Introduction

Do teachers make mistakes? Of course they do, the article will look at some made by either very young inexperienced teachers, or by mature teachers who are too used to their routine, and are not ready to learn `new tricks'. The article will try to sum up some do's and don't's of classroom performance.

Dealing with foreign language classroom mistakes

Let's first look at the most frequent type of Teacher-Student interaction - giving instructions. Very often teachers' instructions related to class management or setting up exercises are too wordy, inconsistent, or ambiguous. The reason behind this is that teachers are too busy to write detailed lesson plans. It should be noted that the skill of drafting a clear, logical, well-structured lesson plan is crucial for newly-qualified teachers. In particular, they should be able to write down and edit their instructions to exercises with a view to making them clear, concise and comprehensible.

Another related question concerns the language that we should speak in class: should we use the target language or should we fall back on our native tongue to give instructions or to teach grammar? The answer is simple: we should make the most of the target language and expose our students to good, accurate foreign language as early as possible. Of course, if we want to introduce a new grammar topic, it's always safer, and in the long run less time-consuming, to explain new rules and concepts in the native tongue. But when it comes to giving routine instructions, we should most certainly rely on the target language, which is why, going back to our first point, our instructions should be well-formulated.

Talking about code-switching, it is not a good idea, even at the initial stage of language learning, to first say something in a foreign language and then immediately translate that into one's native tongue. Lesson observation has proved that, unfortunately, this is a typical mistake of many teachers. The practice of translating whatever you say in the target language into one's native tongue should be avoided as it does not motivate students to make an effort and to try and understand your instruction.

If your students fail to follow your instruction, this gives you an opportunity to teach them some useful classroom language, like the following:

`Excuse me, could I ask you a question?',

`Sorry to interrupt, but I didn't quite understand what you said', etc.

Obviously, beginners can just raise their hands to show that they need some clarification. In fact, offering clarification should be part of any instruction, and a very important part, too.

`Any questions so far?', etc.

To give a few examples.

`Is there anything I need to explain ?'

`Are you all clear about what you are to do?'

So far, we have been talking about the form of the instruction, but its content is no less relevant. What we would like to emphasize here is that the instruction should explain the purpose of the exercise and describe the procedure of the activity so that the students are absolutely clear about what they are expected to do. The task you set should be communicatively meaningful and pursue specific teaching and learning goals. We fail to follow this recommendation when we just ask our students to read a text or to listen to a text. Our students should have a very clear idea as to what information they need to read or listen for.

For example. "Read the text and answer the following questions',

`Listen to the text and draw a picture',

`Listen to the story and formulate its message' etc.

Thus our students will have a purpose and will know exactly why they are reading a text or listening to one, and we will be developing our students' specific reading comprehension or listening comprehension skills and strategies.

To expand on this point, when we test our students'listening or reading comprehension skills, we should make sure that testing activities correspond to the pre-listening or pre-reading tasks set.

Developing the idea of meaningful instructions, it is important to remind the teacher of one of the basic principles of communicative language teaching “Authentic and meaningful communication should be the goal of classroom activities" [Longman Dictionary 2002].

What is important is that our exercises should be meaningful and have communicative value, that we should teach our students to communicate their ideas with the help of the language means that they have at their disposal, rather than teach them as many language means - phonological, grammatical or lexical - as possible to be able to use them for communicative purposes one day.

The moment you teach your students a language unit, you should show how it can be used for the sake of communication.

Let's look at a classroom situation to make the point clear. Suppose you teach your students to use patterns like “Hello! How are you?” you tell them that this is the way to greet each other in an informal situation. And you don't ask them to make up dialogues using the pattern. Instead, you ask them to greet each other and to respond to the greeting. In other words, you teach your students to act out life-like situations, not to use language patterns or units. It all comes down to the same exchange: Hello, how are you? - Fine, thank you and you? - I'm fine too, thank you. Yet, the idea behind the exercise is different, and you succeed in following the principle of communicative language teaching mentioned above: your students practice a foreign language in a meaningful situational context.

Another important point is that we should distinguish very clearly between teaching and testing. Unfortunately, we often turn our classroom activities into testing, forgetting that before we do any testing we should do a lot of teaching, in other words, we should test only what we have taught.

To give an example, when we listen to our students retelling something, or when we do another language exercise, we should remember that it is only our students' practice stage. At this stage we can correct our students' mistakes very tightly, we can praise our students' effort and hard work, or criticize their lack of effort or careless work. But it is only at the final stage of the teaching continuum, which is the testing stage, that we assess the level of the development of our students' skills and competences and give them grades. What is also important here is that the assessment stage is not only about testing our students, it is also about getting some feedback on our own teaching performance. We ask ourselves the following questions:

How well have I been teaching?

What should be improved?

Was my teaching efficient?

Was it fun for my students to attend my class? etc.

So far we have discussed the structure and the content of foreign language teachers' instructions. What is of no less importance is the teachers' linguistic competence. Good language teaching characteristics include, in particular, technical knowledge, which means that a good language teacher understands the linguistic systems of FL phonology, grammar and discourse, and has fluent competence in speaking, writing, listening to, and reading a foreign language [Brown 2007 ].

Unfortunately, the potential of the classroom language as a powerful teaching tool is often underestimated. The classroom situation, despite its renowned remoteness from real life, has enormous intrinsic potential in language teaching. By managing the class deliberately and flexibly in the foreign language, the teacher can take an important step towards removing the barriers between controlled, and often meaningless practice and more genuine teacher-student interaction [Hughes1987].

We have to admit that non-native language teachers' linguistic and communicative competences do not always meet the necessary standards, which can cause the so-called teacher-induced mistakes. This is why we will point out the most frequent linguistic mistakes committed by foreign language teachers which can have a negative impact on their students' performance.

Lesson observation and teacher testing have shown that some teachers have difficulty using common verbs like say, tell, or speak, which make up a large part of classroom discourse. Let us look at some typical classroom instructions.

For example, in the following instructions some teachers tend to omit the direct object, forgetting that the verb to say is a transitive one.

Say it louder.

Say it again.

Say it in English.

Say it so that we all hear.

Say and tell are often confused. Elementary as the rule is, some teachers forget that we say something (to somebody) and we tell somebody something /about something.

Could you say a little to us about your holiday?

Can you say the same thing in English?

I'm afraid I've got nothing else to say on the problem.

Tell us about the end of the novel.

Tell us what happened at the party.

The verb to speak is also used inaccurately sometimes, it is often confused with the verbs to say or tell.

I'd like you to speak about your holiday (or I'd like you to say a few words about your holiday / I'd like you to tell us something about your holiday).

Another typical language inaccuracy has to do with questions; many foreign language teachers have difficulty formulating different types of questions, in particular so-called split questions. The source of the problem lies in native ( Russian) tongue interference.

Cf. Russian: Как вы думаете, почему герой рассказа так поступил? Как вы думаете, ответ верный?

English: Why do you think the protagonist of the story behaved like that?

Do you think the answer was correct?

In fact, split questions could be well used not only to find out some information in a tentative way, but also to turn our commands into requests, which is preferable in the foreign language classroom.

Cf. Try the next question. > Do you think you could try the next question?

Translate the last two lines. > Do you think you could translate the last two lines?

Conclusion

The language we use in the classroom in order to explain things, give instructions, to praise or correct, i.e. the metalanguage, is not the language that is `taught'. However, students can learn a lot from the metalanguage because it is used for genuine communicative purposes. That is one of the reasons why we should try to avoid using our students' mother tongue if possible. With lower level students, though, it is necessary to choose words and structures students already know.

References

1. Longman Dictionary of language Teaching and Applied Linguistics. London, Pearson Education Limited, 2002 ( Third Edition).

2. Brown, H. Douglas. Teaching by Principles: An Interactive Approach to Language Pedagogy. San Francisco State University, Pearson Education, 2007.

3. Hughes, Glyn. S. A Handbook of Classroom English. Oxford University Press, 1981.

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