Good
reasons why teachers don't correct all your mistakes:
1. Class time
If the class is 60 minutes long and the
teacher spends 30 minutes correcting student mistakes, that only leaves 30 minutes
for speaking, reading, listening, writing, checking homework, setting homework,
explaining the new language of the day etc.
2. Slip ups
Some of the mistakes you make are just because
you are tired, thinking about something else, concentrating on different
language etc. If so, you already know that language is wrong and the teacher
pointing that out to you is not very useful.
3. Relevance
The mistake you have just made might not be connected to
the language in your course, might not be the language you need to reach the next
level, or might not be something the other students need to hear about.
4. Concentration/ distractions
If the teacher corrects you on many
different unrelated points of grammar, you will not be able to concentrate
fully on the most important ones or on the language point of the day.
5. Fluency
If the teacher corrects you every time you make
a mistake you will always be thinking about mistakes and that will slow down
your speaking. Speaking very slowly and correcting yourself all the time will
stop you reaching the next level and will make it hard for people to talk to
you without getting bored and impatient. It will also slow down your reading
and writing speeds, and make it hard for you to listen to people speaking at
normal speed.
6. Expanding your language
If your teacher corrects every mistake,
that will also probably make you only use easy language so that you know that
it is right. To be ready to go up to the next level, however, you need to be
ambitious in your use of language and try to use each new word or new grammar
item any time you think it might be possible.
7. Natural learning style
Many people do not realise that children
learn their first language (mother tongue) without much correction. One of the
stages they naturally go through is using new grammar they have just learnt too
often (I passed, I buyed x, I seed x) for a few weeks or months until the
language has been properly learnt. Most teachers and researchers believe that
people learning a second language need to go through the same stage with new
grammar, and that being corrected a lot at that time does not help students to
speak more accurately and may even confuse them more and slow down their
progress.
8. Saving mistakes for later
Your teacher might be saving your mistakes
on paper or in their head so that they can do the error correction when you can
properly concentrate on it and/ or so that they can choose the most important mistakes
to concentrate on in this lesson or future lessons.
9. Introducing new language instead
If your teacher has to spend lots of time
correcting you on a basic grammar point and so can't move on quickly to the
next grammar point, that might hold you back from reaching the next level. Most
teachers and researchers believe that reaching the point where you don't make
mistakes on one grammar point takes time however you study and however often
you are corrected, so it is best to move onto another point for a while and
then go back and revise rather than keep repeating the same correction until
you never make mistakes.
10. Confidence boosting
One of the most important things you need
to speak fluently and keep your motivation to study is confidence in your
ability to communicate. If the teacher is always interrupting you and
correcting you, it can be easy to become nervous about speaking.
11. Negative reactions
Even though you know you need correction,
it is possible that when your teacher does make a correction you usually look
disappointed or even angry. If so, your teacher might be nervous about
correcting and not believe that you really want more correction. If you are
open to correction and always remember that your teacher is not saying your
English is bad, they might correct you more often.
Bad
reasons why your teacher might not correct all your mistakes
If at least one of the reasons above is
true, there is no need to complain about your teacher or be suspicious of how
they teach you. Not all teachers are perfect, however, so if you think it is
one of the reasons below you might want to think about talking to your teacher,
talking to the school manager or changing classes:
1. The teacher is lazy
This is not likely to be the reason why they
don't correct you more often, as stopping students when they make mistakes is
easier for most teachers than, for example, designing classes where students
speak a lot or teaching students to listen to fast speech.
2. The teacher doesn't know you are making mistakes
All native speakers know when a non-native
speaker says something that a native speaker wouldn't say, so this is only
possible if you have a non-native teacher. If so, try asking them a direct
question about whether something you say is correct or not. Even if they are
still not sure, they can then go away and check in a book in the teachers' room
or ask one of their colleagues.
3. The teacher doesn't know how to explain why what you said is wrong
This could be because the teacher is
someone who has learnt English naturally and so doesn't know how to explain it,
because the question is far above the level of the class, the question is above
the level of the teacher, or that it is a part of language that there is no
explanation for. You can help your teachers to become less nervous about
answering such questions by allowing them to explain things to you another day
after thinking about it and by sometimes accepting "There is no reason why the
language is like that".
4. The teacher doesn't believe in error correction as a way of learning
language
Some language learners and teachers believe
that people should learn English as a Foreign Language exactly how babies learn
their own language, without any error correction. The majority of teachers and
researchers believe, however, that the right amount of error correction done at
the right time and in the right way is a very important factor in successful language
learning. If your teacher lets several classes pass with no error correction at
all, try asking them if there is a special reason and if there will be more
error correction in future classes.
