The Art and Science of Learning Languages by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub

Page 153

§201 Being Corrected When You Write

Correction of your written language is a completely different matter. You should always try to get this done. It should be for most people the most efficient way of finding out for certain whether they are using the foreign language accurately and naturally. The best person to do the correcting is a native speaker who is also a teacher; unfortunately it is of course very often not possible to find such a person.

§202 Choosing the Right Person to Correct Your Mistakes

You can naturally always ask people who are not teachers to correct your writing for you. But you should be on your guard. However kind and intelligent and welleducated people may be, they can make statements about their own language that are not true. It may seem strange that this is so. But it often happens, sometimes because they have not thought consciously about how their language works, and sometimes because they have unrealistic ideas about language, and think one ought to speak or write in a certain way which is not the way they actually speak or write themselves, and may not be the way other native speakers speak in practice either.

§203 How Much Should a Corrector Correct?

How much should a corrector correct? 'In my opinion,' says AG, 'everything that is the slightest wrong or unidiomatic should be corrected down to the smallest detail.

'One can hear the argument 'At this stage it is not necessary to correct that and that sort of mistake. It will only confuse the student if you correct too much. It is better to get the basics right first. Then we can deal with the more difficult stuff later.'

'The trouble with this approach is that what is considered unimportant at one stage becomes important at the next stage, and absolutely essential at the stage after that.

Yet on the way the student has been allowed to get into the habit of writing what is wrong, while believing the whole time that it is right. Correctors who only correct some mistakes are deceiving students, unless they tell them what they are doing. I would be extremely worried if my corrector told me that some of my mistakes were not being corrected. I would start wondering the whole time whether what I had written was right or wrong; I would not be able to forget that what one person would consider important another might not; and I would ask myself how much language I was continually using incorrectly that I would later find it very difficult to start using correctly.'

§204 How Conscientious is the Correcting?

There is another problem connected with correcting. Not all correctors correct equally conscientiously. This is a very difficult problem, and before one condemns the more careless correctors, one should consider the reasons there may be for their carelessness.

They may, of course, simply be lazy or ignorant, or both. There is no excuse for this, but unfortunately there are some teachers of this sort around, and it is not always easy for their students to spot them.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.