Chapter 15

CW15.1 En casa de herrero, cuchillo de palo

If you are interested in teacher deviations from lesson plans, Bailey’s (1996) paper is worth a read. It is entitled ‘The best laid plans: teachers’ in-class decisions to depart from their lesson plans’. The paper begins with an example of a deviation from a lesson plan that Bailey herself experienced as an intermediate learner of Spanish. One day, the class was practising the pronunciation of the rolled double ‘r’ in words like ferrocarril and herrero. This latter word reminded Bailey of a Latin American proverb: En casa de herrero, cuchillo de palo – literally In the ironmonger’s house, there are knives of wood. The proverb is used to express the idea that professionals do not always use their own skills to solve problems in their own lives. Bailey muttered the proverb under her breath, but the teacher heard and used the proverb to get the class to think of examples: ‘the crazy psychiatrist, the dentist whose children have rotten teeth, the shoemaker whose children have no shoes, the linguist who is a poor communicator, and so on’ (Bailey 1996: 15).

The proverb led to lengthy discussion in class, all in Spanish! After the class, Bailey calculated that 10 per cent of the lesson was spent on this activity. Unplanned but thoroughly valuable conversation practice.

CW15.2 Dizzys from wine

Hughes and Lascaratou’s 1982 paper is one of a number which focus on error gravity – looking at how different groups of people differ in their views about what makes an error ‘serious’. There are 36 judges in their study, in three groups of 12:

  • native-speaker teachers of English;
  • non-native-speaker (Greek) teachers of English;
  • educated native speakers of English who are not teachers.

These judges were given 32 sentences taken from compositions written by Greek high-school students. Each sentence contained just one error from a small number of categories (including vocabulary, word order, spelling). Judges were asked to identify the errors and say how many ‘marks’ (from 0 to 5) should be lost for the error. A very serious error would lose 5 marks and a minor one would lose 1.

Hughes and Lascaratou were interested to identify differences between their groups in terms of judgements of error gravity. Before you look at their findings below, think what you would expect. Which group would be more lenient overall? Which would be most strict? Would you expect there to be differences in the kinds of errors found most serious by each group?

Their findings:

  • The non-native-speaker teachers were significantly stricter than the other (native speaker) groups, deducting many more points. Why do you think this should be? The native-speaker teachers and non-teachers were as lenient as each other.
  • The main criterion for the Greek teachers’ judgements of seriousness is to do with the ‘basicness’ of the rule being infringed. When rules which were taught early were repeatedly broken, the Greek teachers’ wrath was incurred. One example is the sentence *Dizzys from the wine we decided to go home, where the writer has made the adjective dizzy plural by adding an –s. The Greek teacher group as a whole deducted 42 points for this error, while the native-speaker non-teachers only knocked off 21.
  • The criterion most used by the non-teachers was intelligibility. If an error badly impaired comprehension, it was regarded as serious. An example is the sentence There are many accidents because we haven’t brought roads. There is a spelling mistake here – brought for broad – and the mistake makes the overall meaning not immediately obvious. The native-speaker teacher group also had a tendency to use intelligibility as an important criterion.

Hughes and Lascaratou say that ‘lexical errors have long been recognized as probably the most likely cause of unintelligibility’ (1982: 179). It is therefore no surprise that both the native-speaker groups regard lexical errors as particularly serious.

CW15.3 Towards error recognition

Here are Brumfit’s (1977) six stages for correcting written work, moving learners towards recognition of their own mistakes:

STAGE 1

underline the mistake and diagnose it in the margin

P Sp

‘Go home’, I sad.

STAGE 2

underline but do not diagnose

‘Go home’, I sad.

STAGE 3

diagnose but do not show where in the line the mistake is

P Sp

‘Go home’, I sad.

STAGE 4

simply put a cross in the margin
for each mistake

xx
(for a line with two mistakes)

‘Go home’, I sad.

STAGE 5

put a cross for each line with a mistake (but do not show how many)

x

‘Go home’, I sad.

STAGE 6

hand the work back to the groups for discussion without correcting it at all

‘Go home’, I sad