Making the Most out of Making Mistakes

Whenever we learn something new like a language, making mistakes is part of the process. What is the difference between a mistake and an error in language learning? How do language teachers help learners correct their mistakes? Why don’t the people around us correct us when we make a mistake? Join Britta and Kelsey as they discuss these questions, and offer advice and suggestions to help us make the most out of our mistakes. Language teachers may also be interested to learn more about the effectiveness of different types of feedback in the language classroom. 

This week, our guest host is Kelsey Ulrich-Verslycken.  Kelsey fell in love with teaching English in 2013 when she moved to South Korea to teach English as a Foreign Language. Since then, she has worked as a teacher, a curriculum developer, an editor for EFL textbooks, and an assistant professor of English at a university in Seoul, completed her MA in Applied Linguistics, and is currently working with ACA and pursuing her PhD in Applied Language and Discourse Studies at Carleton University in Ottawa.

In our weekly recommendations, 

Kelsey recommends forgiving yourself for making mistakes in the language you are learning. Try not to listen to your inner critic. Britta recommends setting your digital assistant to communicate in the language you are learning. This will help you check your comprehensibility and pronunciation. Hola Siri! Bonjour Alexa!

Come check out our website, at lesbonsmots.ca. You can see our language learning videos, and read our blog posts on news, culture and language learning. We will also have our episode transcript available there. We’d love to hear from you at [email protected]. 

Here is some of the research we used in preparing the episode, if you want to read more about the research behind error correction: 

Li, Shaofeng. (2010). The Effectiveness of Corrective Feedback in SLA: A Meta‐Analysis. Language Learning. 60. 309 - 365. 

Lyster, R. and Saito, K. (2010) Interactional feedback as instructional input: A synthesis of classroom SLA research.  Language, Interaction and Acquisition, 1(2),  276 - 297

Mai, Zhou. (2009). Cooperative Principle in Oral English Teaching. International Education Studies. 2.

Nassaji, H. Anniversary article Interactional feedback in second language teaching and learning: A synthesis and analysis of current research. Language Teaching Research 20(4)

Sheen, Y. (2006). Exploring the relationship between characteristics of recasts and

learner uptake. Language Teaching Research 10, 361–392.