Wrong

One of the key elements of assessment is, unsurprisingly, identifying mistakes. (Note, please that I said “one of” there; please, no lectures about identifying and sharing positives. I know this.) Mistakes help us identify something a student doesn’t know or can’t do, so they can guide us into making decisions about what to focus on in our teaching.

That’s what the text books say, anyway. It sounds impressive, very neat, very tidy, and maybe if you’re talking about times tables or the key battles of the English Civil War, then it can be that tidy. Don’t know the answer to 7×8? Fine. Here’s a mnemonic to help, and bosh. (56=7×8… 5678, in case you were wondering. Much love to the maths teaching colleague who taught me that little trick). Don’t know when the battle of Edgehill was? Here’s a date, go learn. (October 23rd, 1642, to stop you dwelling on it)

Of course, subjects which require a bit more analysis and thought (including most of the rest of maths and history) may have mistakes manifest in different ways, but there are, certainly at a base level, some fairly tidy measurable stages.

ESOL is a bit of a challenge when it comes to mistakes. We need to think about what the nature of the mistake is and what it tells us about the students’ interlanguage in order to make a decision about what to do. This is not as easy as it might sound.

Take, for example, one of my Entry 2 students who wrote “two is” instead of “twice.” What exactly is wrong here? Is it just spelling? Is it a listening problem, where the student has misanalysed the sounds? Is it a lexical problem – they don’t know the word but have maybe heard it somewhere. Is it something grammatical? Maybe it’s a bit of all of them? What is wrong here? Sure it’s only one word, and as such easy to “correct” if not explain simply by supplying the right answer, but it was interesting to think about where it had come from.

Then there was a conversation in class today when I was giving feedback on some writing “You keep forgetting ‘a’ and ‘the’”. The student is working towards a Level 1 (sort of B2/C1, if you’re international) and could, when prompted, explain to me precisely the rules for using articles in the example they had written. So what is going wrong, and what are we supposed to do to address it? Teaching a lesson where we go over the rules is clearly unnecessary, but perhaps some sort of consolidating practice and analysis?

And then yesterday I was marking some Level 1 writing and a student had written the fascinating sentence “We have to avail our free time.” This pulled me up dead in my tracks. What is going on here? Now the trouble is, it sounds almost plausible  – avail does mean use or help, but generally refers to a thing helping a person, rather than the other way round: “All the work did not avail.” The plausibility led me to look it up and one of the online dictionary entries jumped out at me.

“SOUTH ASIAN ENGLISH
use or take advantage of (an opportunity or available resource).
“you can avail discounts on food”

Now it just so happened that the student is from Pakistan, fairly strong and university educated – partly in English – and could very conceivably have come across this usage. The conversation she and I will have is going to be interesting to say the least. Is it wrong? After all, in an alternative variety of English, it is right. Sure, we could play the “standard British English” card here, but that’s a dodgy card to play. What is “standard”? Which one do you want? I recall an Ofsted inspector-cum-consultant/grifter giving a firm lecture in a pleasant Northern Irish accent about why we should all be making sure FE students use “standard” British English, including the frankly psychotic observation that his own accent was not up to that standard. I live and work in Yorkshire but I was born in the south of England, meaning I am in possession of something close to the “standard” British accent. Locally speaking, however, my accent is non-standard and wide open to all sorts of misconceptions and abuses (I’ve been told by people significantly more wealthy than me that I am “posh”.) And why is British English preferred over another variety? It’s not like we are talking about an obscure new youth slang, but rather mature, established and recognised varieties. Nigerian, South Asian (and variations thereof), Singaporean, not to mention Australian, New Zealand and of course American. We are, of course, in the UK, and working towards British qualifications, so the “British English only” perhaps seems like “common sense”, but this does nothing but muddy the water with culture and class-based prejudices.

So she and I are going to have a conversation about it and I’ll explain some of this and we can decide what is best together.

So whichever way you play it, mistakes are complicated things and they deserve our attention. For some teachers, saying something is wrong is itself wrong; as if using a negative is going to harm someone irrevocably. Thus terms like “fail” “wrong”  or “no” are wrong and you get people writing “did not pass” on exam papers as if the absence of “fail” is going to make it all somehow better.

Of course you have to consider how you point out mistakes. With spoken language you may want to think how and when to address the errors in order to minimise disruption to fluency, for instance. But I see mistakes a s thing of joy and beauty. They usually show that someone is thinking and, crucially, learning. I smile at mistakes, even, very occasionally, laugh. Not because they’re wrong, but, and I make this clear to students when I do it, because of the brilliance of the wrongness. “No,” I say, “that’s wrong, but I can see how you’re thinking and it’s great.”