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Error correction in English teaching - Part 3 - How to correct

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VIDEO: Delayed correction practice (4 mins)

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VIDEO: Delayed correction practice (4 mins)

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World of Better Learning | Cambridge University Press

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It's a fact of learning a language that your L1 can interfere with your L2 (or your L3, or your L4...) - and the fascinating thing is that this interference generally happens along very predictable patterns. Thanks to thousands of exam papers and some impressive language analysis at the heart of the Cambridge Learner Corpus, we're now more able than ever to look at common mistakes English learners make and draw conclusions about how a particular L1 might impact upon a particular group of learners' acquisition of English. We can then equip teachers and learners with this information to help them become more accurate, conscious users of English.

So what kind of common mistakes are learners of English making?

Before we go any further, let's interrupt today's blog post with a quiz. These questions are drawn from data provided by the Cambridge Learner Corpus. You can find the answers at the bottom of the page.
1: French speakers often have problems spelling the word company. How do they usually spell it? 2: Japanese speakers often forget to include certain words in a sentence. Which sentence might be typical of a Japanese learner?
a) I going to London to visit the Tate Modern museum.
b) I'm going to London to visit Tate Modern museum.
c) I'm going to London visit the Tate Modern museum.
3) Spanish speakers often have problems spelling the word comfortable. How is it often misspelled?
Remember to check your answers at the bottom - how did you do? Leave us a comment with your thoughts about why they're making these common mistakes!

Interesting stuff, isn't it? But how did we get this information? Let's take a closer look the Cambridge Learner Corpus: what it is, how it works, and how we can use it to improve teaching and learning.

What is the Cambridge Learner Corpus?

According to a corpus is Cambridge Dictionary Online, a collection of written or spoken material stored on a computer and used to find out how language is used. Here at Cambridge, we have a general English corpus, a spoken corpus and the aforementioned learner corpus. Jointly built by Cambridge Assessment English and Cambridge University Press, the Cambridge Learner Corpus is an enormous bank of more than 50 million words (and counting!).

We're very fortunate at Cambridge University Press to have a dedicated Language Research Team who carry out a lot of work based around corpus linguistics to discover how language is really used, and this directly feeds in to the materials that we produce. It's an exciting area of research and the implications for teaching, learning, and materials design are huge.

How does the Cambridge Learner Corpus work?

Students go in to an exam room to take one of the Cambridge English language papers. They sit down, take out their pen, and with varying degrees of confidence, complete their writing paper. These are then collected and anonymised - the identifying information is stripped away, until we're left with an exam paper, a grade, the candidate's mother tongue and nationality, and so on. The information in the exam papers is coded by an expert team to identify errors such as spelling mistakes or incorrect choice of tense or word, and fed into the Cambridge Learner Corpus.

This is where it gets really interesting. The Cambridge Learner Corpus is able to group this information in a way that's meaningful. For example, we can look at individual groups of students and find out what they typically get wrong and what they do well at. We could look at all students whose first language in Spanish and find out the common spelling mistakes they produce; we could check the top ten mistakes that Thai learners make with collocations; or we could ask the corpus to tell us the grammar that all students seem to struggle with for the PET exam.

Common English mistakes factsheets: download

Interested in learning more? If so, we've put together some common learner error factsheets for eight different languages, which you can download.

How can insights from the Cambridge Learner Corpus help to improve teaching and learning?

The most obvious application for the Corpus is that it can help us anticipate the problems our learners are likely to have. It makes sense that teaching and learning materials actively try to build an awareness of common errors, presenting and practising the correct versions to help avoid fossilisation of these errors.

Our authors draw on insights from the Cambridge Learner Corpus to provide implicit and explicit practice of typical problem areas. Pedagogical research tells us that learners respond well to consciousness-raising activities, and that teachers can be helped by knowing what issues their learners are likely to face and planning or reacting accordingly.

But how can we do this? Our next blog post discusses how you can use common learner errors to your advantage in the classroom, with some practical tips for learner training and consciousness-raising activities to really help improve your learners' accuracy. In the meantime, make sure to check out the common learner error factsheets!
Quiz answers: 1a, 2b, 3b

However confident we are in our understanding of a language, we have to accept that language is something that changes over time. Interested in delving into the topic of language change? Read Niall Curry's article here.

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Common mistakes English learners make in different countries | Cambridge English

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It's a fact of learning a language that your L1 can interfere with your L2 (or your L3, or your L4...) - and the fascinating thing is that this interference generally happens along very predictable patterns.