--Mr. Schmidt doesn’t take teaching very seriously, especially grammar.
4
Culture notes
Correcting foreigners’ English mistakes: While a language teacher might be willing to interrupt a student of English in order to point out his/her errors, most Westerners would consider this rude or awkward. I fact, in most countries the average person would probably not interrupt a language learner to correct his/her grammar mistakes. What many people will do when talking to foreigners is to correct things the foreigner said wrong by repeating them later correctly, so if the learner pays attention he/she might still learn a lot. (If a learner obviously
5
appreciates each of these little corrections and makes an attempt to learn from them, this will encourage others to continue correcting. If, on the other hand, the learner seems to ignore corrections of be annoyed by them, it is not likely that the other person will continue correcting very long.)
--Mr. Schmidt does correct Huizhen’s errors,
but he only corrects her subtly by
repeating corrected versions of what
Huizhen said wrong. Huizhen just doesn’t
7
Western approaches to language learning: Many Western teachers take an approach to language learning and teaching which emphasizes communication, sometimes even at the expense of attention to grammatical accuracy. The idea is that when using English it is more important to understand others and be understood by others than it is to have every sentence be perfectly correct. Of course, this does not mean that grammatical accuracy is unimportant, but it does mean that American teachers may stress grammar less than students from other cultures are accustomed to.
6
Correction and language learning: There is actually little evidence that active correction of mistakes in spoken English by a teacher helps learners improve their grammar much. Some corrections help learners learn, but most corrections tend to be ignored or forgotten. How much a learner learns depends more on how carefully he/she pays attention than on how much the teacher corrects.
2
--Mr. Schmidt doesn’t correct Huizhen because he doesn’t want to interrupt her; he doesn’t want to discourage Huizhen from talking.
--Mr. Schmidt thinks it would be rude to correct Huizhen’s English errors.
Unit 3 Speaking in a Foreign Language
Lecture 3
1
Part I Encounter (Page 39)
Somhen actually doesn’t make many
mistakes, and Mr. Schmidt doesn’t consider the few mistakes she makes serious. --Mr. Schmidt doesn’t notice Huizhen’s mistakes because he is paying more attention to the content of what Huizhen was saying.
notice.
3
--Mr. Schmidt doesn’t think that correcting students’ errors helps their English very much.
--Mr. Schmidt avoids making grammar corrections because he can’t explain English grammar very well.