Chapter 8 in PLLT spends quite a bit of time addressing error analysis and error correction. Using a student’s error to gain insight into his or her Interlanguage is all fine and good, but what do you do in the moment? What do you do, as a teacher when the error occurs? While I admit that I am not a teacher, I have been a student to a great deal of foreign language teachers, and I’ve encountered a broad spectrum of error treatments. Some good, some very, very bad.

I remember being frustrated as a high school student studying German. I noticed that my teacher rarely corrected people, particularly in pronunciation. Being a teenager, chock full o’ hormones and a pissy punk-rock attitude, I thought, “Wow, he really sucks at this and he doesn’t even know it.” Of course I never thought at the time that I might be making errors that were also going unchecked. I also didn’t have the insight to know that it’s not always a good thing to jump right in there and correct someone. There’s always the risk of making someone so self-conscious that they don’t want to speak.

Obviously global errors (errors that make interpretation difficult or impossible (Brown: 223)) need to be treated immediately, if for no other reason than to understand the utterance. Local errors however, do not impede comprehension, and thus do not require the same kind of urgent treatment. Looking back, I see that my high school German teacher did the right thing in not correcting every little pronunciation error. Instead she devoted time to working on pronunciation with the entire class, treating the errors while saving individuals the embarrassment of being singled out.

My early experience with German in college was pleasant. The lower level classes were all taught by TAs. Most of them were German. All of them were cute in that post-modern, spiky-haired, tiny glasses way. I loved those classes. I don’t remember anything about the approach to error correction. I think I spent most of my time gazing longingly at leather skirts, black wooly sweaters and jagged euro-teeth.

The upper division classes were a completely different animal. My first (and several subsequent) upper division classes were with an Austrian Troll woman. No more TAs. The troll woman was indeed made of stone, and when you made a mistake, she would come down on you like an avalanche. My dear friend Michelle quit studying foreign languages altogether because of this woman. Michelle had been studying German for five years and her mother is German, but when confronted by the troll it was just too much. Michelle and I lived together at the time, and the night before every class with the troll woman Michelle would get stomach aches and nausea. It was almost ten years before Michelle took another language class, and that was only because she absolutely had to (working as an archaeologist in Guatemala and Belize).

There are two kinds of feedback that learners get from audiences when speaking: Affective and Cognitive (Brown: 232). Affective feedback is the emotional side, the audience (or teacher) demonstrating respect or disdain for the speaker, affirmation or disapproval, etc. Affective feedback is often given by nonverbal means, such as hand gestures or facial expressions, but can also be conveyed by tone of voice or the words themselves (You’re an idiot!). Cognitive feedback tells the speaker whether or not their message has been understood. This can also take many forms, but in the classroom situation, it’s usually some form of thumbs up or thumbs down (verbal or gestural) from the teacher.

Negative cognitive feedback simply tells the speaker that the message has not been understood or is incorrect. This can be given in conjunction with positive affective feedback: “That’s a good shot, but give it another try. Think about the verb.” This example statement positively affirms the speaker, but provides the negative cognitive feedback telling the speaker that a mistake has been made, it even hints at correction.

In dealing with classroom errors, it’s best to try to avoid negative affective feedback. Making speakers feel ashamed of themselves for making an error doesn’t help them learn, it shuts them down. In Michelle’s case it actually induced debilitating anxiety. It doesn’t have to be outright insults either, tone of voice can say a lot.

While it is important to correct errors, and students expect to be corrected to some extent, it’s also important not to focus so much on error correction that you miss the parts that are done well. Students need to see that they’re making progress, that they are actually learning something and getting better. A simple decrease in the amount of correction (in direct proportion to the decrease in errors) doesn’t tell them this. The teacher occasionally needs to pat them on the back and give them a big old “Sehr gut gemacht,” or “Yoku dekimashita.”