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Discussion Groups / ESL Teaching / June 2007What "good mistakes" do English teachers make? Examples?
What good mistakes do teachers make? As an English teacher at a California university, I often try to encourage students to stretch themselves and "make good mistakes" in my class so we can make new, different, and better mistakes in the future. A good mistake, from my perspective, is a reasonable - even predictable mistake that we can learn from and move on. For example, a student confuses the spelling for the number 2 (two) with the preposition (to). Homonyms give even native speakers a headache. On the other hand, some structural problems are deeply ingrained "good mistakes" that will take a long time and focused effort to correct and overcome. For example, if a Korean student "forgets" to use the articles "a", "an" or "the" on a paper, then I also consider that a "good mistake." We often learn best by identifying good mistakes. But to know, and not do, as the Talmud remind us, is to not know. But I would like to put the shoe on the other foot for this online discussion. What good mistakes have your English teachers made? Do they speak on in a monotone? Do English teacher go too fast, forget to review, ignore questions, or use too many unfamiliar words? Do they forget their students' names? What "good mistakes" have you seen in your classrooms and schools? Consider me curious. Eric eric@compellingconversations.com www.compellingconversations.com Ask more. Know more. Share more. Create compelling conversations. > student confuses the spelling for the number 2 (two) with the > preposition (to). Homonyms give even native speakers a headache. From my experience as a learner of Russian as compulsory foreing language back in the 1970s, teaching similar words together is a big no-no. The Russian words for "coal" and "corner" are similar up to a nuance in a consonant, and we were made to recite "the coal is standing in the corner". Likewise, "This is a [school] bench and this is a map", another pair of similar-sounding Russian nouns. The end result was a huge confusion. After all these years, I still need to pause for a moment to avoid mixing up "coal" and "corner" in Russian. Were the nouns introduced separately, nobody would have thought of confusing them any more than you confuse kite and night in English. Cheers, Leszek. > U¿ytkownik <howdo...@gmail.com> napisa³ w wiadomo¶cinews:1180487782.580864.48370@i13g2000prf.googlegroups.com... > [quoted text clipped - 17 lines] > Cheers, > Leszek. That's an excellent example of unintended consequences. Teaching homonyms does seem rather tricky, but also vital because so many students - at least in my writing classes - make this type of error. If the error is in their third language, you can't be too angry, but many native speakers make these errors too - and those are bad mistakes. > That's an excellent example of unintended consequences. Teaching > homonyms does seem rather tricky, but also vital because so many > students - at least in my writing classes - make this type of error. I suggest it might be preferable to teach one word of the homonym pair at a time, treating the alternative as a mistake. To use Tomasz's example of dessert/desert, I'd insist that the sweet course at the end of a meal is spelled with a double S and pronounced with a hissing sound, while a single S and a "z" sound is wrong, period. And I wouldn't even mention the concept of "a vast dry area", leaving it for another semester. Cheers, L. There is a pervasive tendency for the same semantically unrelated concepts to be joined as (near) homonyms across languages. So, if the native language of your student contains a homonym pair or triplet as the English homonym (that may or may not be phonetically or etymologically related), then you can use the native language occurrence to illustrate its occurrence in English. The examples below use Hebrew and English only because English is my first language and Hebrew is my second. Fabric = cloth. Fabricate = to produce/manufacture but also to make up a false story. Hebrew BaD = cloth, fabric. BaDaH = myth, a false story. BaDai = one who tells a false story. He made it up out of whole cloth. There's not a stitch of truth in it. Sentence = a grammatical statement with a period at the end; the pronouncement of a judge or court. Hebrew MiSHPaT = a grammatical sentence; sentence of a judge/court. Sound = a tone/noise that you can hear; to dive deep, measure the depth, a deep place. Hebrew TZ'LiL = a sound you can hear; to dive deep. The whale sounded. To sound the depths of the sea. Puget Sound = a deep place near the shore. Latin anima/animus. English animated/animosity. (Using X for the het and @ for aleph) Hebrew Roo'aX = spirit; it's reversal XaRon (@aF) = anger, negative feeling towards someone. Swipe = path of a wiper, a sweeping blow; to steal. Hebrew SaXaV = to wipe dry; to steal. SaXVaH = a wiper. In Hebrew, the more standartd words for these concepts are GaNaV = to steel and its metathesis NaGeV = to wipe dry. There are a lot of these. For other examples, Google < homonyms Hebrew izzy >. Ciao, Israel "izzy" Cohen http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/BPMaps/ > There is a pervasive tendency for the same semantically unrelated > concepts to be joined as (near) homonyms across languages. So, if the > native language of your student contains a homonym pair or triplet as > the English homonym (that may or may not be phonetically or > etymologically related), then you can use the native language > occurrence to illustrate its occurrence in English. I haven't noticed the pervasive tendency you are describing. Could it be that Hebrew has so many of these parallels to English because it was revived after a long time of near disuse, and needed to coin new words for concepts unknown in antiquity? From my brief and failed attempt to learn Hebrew, I remember noticing HaMxonit = car, an obvious parallel to the Russian mashina=machine=car (pardon all my poor transliterations). Russian also has fascinating parallels to Classic languages where it imported ancient academic concepts; the names of some grammatical cases are translations of their Latin counterparts. So the nominative is called "the naming case", genitive "the childbearing case" dative "the giving case" accusative "the blaming(!) case". > The examples below use Hebrew and English only because English is my > first language and Hebrew is my second. Thank you for the curious samples. > Fabric = cloth. Fabricate = to produce/manufacture but also to make up > a false story. Hebrew BaD = cloth, fabric. BaDaH = myth, a false > story. BaDai = one who tells a false story. He made it up out of whole For what it's worth, the Polish verb "plesc" (or plesc if you can see Polish diacriticals in your reader) means to intertwine strands of material (such as twigs or hair, to make a braid or a basket). The same verb means "to talk nonsense". > cloth. There's not a stitch of truth in it. And if the lies are too glaringly visible, a Pole will say that the story is stitched together with thick thread. > Sentence = a grammatical statement with a period at the end; the > pronouncement of a judge or court. Hebrew MiSHPaT = a grammatical > sentence; sentence of a judge/court. One parallel which seems to exist between English, French, and Polish is the idea to call the political structure of a sovereign nation a "state", the same noun that describes the condition something is in. I vaguely remember a book on English words that explained something along these lines: "The suffix -cy represents a state. False=untrue, fallacy=the state of being false; Democratic=ruled by the people, democracy=a democratic state". To the author of that book, it seemed obvious to equate a political structure with the condition of something. It still perplexes me, even though my native Polish has a similar parallel. Cheers, L. > > [quoted text clipped - 78 lines] > > - cracy comes from ancient Greek krasos/crasos = power. But power also means government. Hence, democracy, aristocracy, theocracy and the modern Russian' kleptocracy'. English 'state' comes from Latin 'status' which already had the 2 distinctions of state being personal situation and state being a political entity. Comes from past participle of Latin verb for stand. One can have a stand literally - a physical place, or emotionally - a state of confusion, state of disbelief, state of numbness, etc English actually got it via French estast. If Polish actually uses the word 'state' it may have got it via church Latin early on, or may have acquired it from another language later. Check a Polish etymological dictionary. Thank you for the informative discussion on multiple good mistakes and homonyms in numerous countries. > >>There is a pervasive tendency for the same semantically unrelated > >>concepts to be joined as (near) homonyms across languages. So, if the [quoted text clipped - 85 lines] > > Check a Polish etymological dictionary. Izzy - Great examples. And thank you for the dual language lesson! Shalom Eric > There is a pervasive tendency for the same semantically unrelated > concepts to be joined as (near) homonyms across languages. So, if the [quoted text clipped - 34 lines] > Ciao, > Israel "izzy" Cohenhttp://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/BPMaps/ >> student confuses the spelling for the number 2 (two) with the >> preposition (to). Homonyms give even native speakers a headache. [quoted text clipped - 13 lines] > Were the nouns introduced separately, nobody would have thought > of confusing them any more than you confuse kite and night in English. Right. E.g. I was taught the pair "desert" - "dessert" at the same time, and now I need to think every time before using any of these. T. D. |
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