unit 5 EXPLOITING LEARNERS´ERRORS

[ALBA CELESTE SALGADO]

How do you help learners to see that making mistakes can be a positive thing?

The danger when the students lose motivation and we may even destroy the flow of the class or the activity and correcting every single mistake.
But Mistakes are the most important thing that happens in some classrooms, because they tell you where to focus that deliberate practice.
students don't think about their mistakes rationally, they think about them emotionally. Mistakes make students feel stupid. "Stupid" is just that: a feeling. Specifically, it's the feeling of shame, and our natural response is to avoid its source. If we say something embarrassing, we hide our face. If we get a bad grade, we hide the test away.
For this reasons we need to face the error as academic success and motivated our student to find their mistakes in the exercises and move the bad circumstances a different situation that helps our student feel better.
If We Change the students' perspective on mistakes is the greatest gift you can give yourself as a teacher. Imagine having a classroom of students who are engaged and constantly improving , it's every teacher's dream. Instead, teachers face too many students who are disengaged and really rather surly. That surliness is years in the making.
Do you have any other good ideas for exploiting students’ mistakes?
Every teacher will have different views on this and different ways of correcting their students and it’s a case of finding out what both you and your students feel comfortable with.
In a fact the teachers have to give the opportunity to the students, that they learn and do the correction in the class. This helps to explain the need for balancing correction with lots of opportunities for learners to express their ideas in English.