Why? Why? Why? Being clear and realistic about the objectives of your efl class

There is a very rough rule of thumb that suggests that adult language students will need to use a word between seven and 25 times in order to internalize it. Be careful about introducing too many words and structures in your lessons. During the course of a one hour lesson, somewhere between five and ten should be OK. Others may come up during the course of your class. New sentence structures, or other grammar points, should probably be limited to one or two.

Write your objectives on the whiteboard at the beginning of your lesson. Between two and four should be manageable. Tick them off once your students have accomplished each objective.

The Golden Rule is that you should start from your objectives and use your textbook to reach them. Don’t just plough through your textbook with no thought to your purpose.

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Mistakes and Errors In order to analyze learner language in an appropriate perspective, it is cru­cial to make a distinction between mistakes and errors, technically two very different phenomena. A mistake refers to a performance error that is either a random guess or a "slip," in that it is a failure to utilize a known system correctly. All people make mistakes, in both native and second lan­guage situations. Native speakers are normally capable of recognizing and correcting such "lapses" or mistakes, which are not the result of a defi­ciency in competence but the result of some sort of temporary breakdown or imperfection in the process of producing speech. These hesitations, slips of the tongue, random ungrammaticalities, and other performance lapses in native-speaker production also occur in second language speech. Mistakes, when attention is called to them, can be self-corrected.

Mistakes must be carefully distinguished from errors of a second lan­guage learner, idiosyncrasies in the language of the learner that are direct manifestations of a system within which a learner is operating at the time. An error, a noticeable deviation from the adult grammar of a native speaker, reflects the competence of the learner. Learners of English who ask, "Does John can sing?" are in all likelihood reflecting a competence level in which all verbs require a pre-posed do auxiliary for question formation. As such, it is an error, most likely not a mistake, and an error that reveals a portion of the learner's competence in the target language.

Can you tell the difference between an error and a mistake? Not always. An error cannot be self-corrected, according to James (1998: 83), while mistakes can be self-corrected if the deviation is pointed out to the speaker. But the learner's capacity for self-correction is objectively observable only if the learner actually self-corrects; therefore, if no such self-correction occurs, we are still left with no means to identify error vs. mis­take. So, can we turn to frequency of a deviant form as a criterion? Sometimes. If, on one or two occasions, an English learner says "John cans sing," but on other occasions says "John can sing," it is difficult to determine whether "cans" is a mistake or an error. If, however, further examination of the learner's speech consistently reveals such utterances as "John wills go; "John mays come," and so forth, with very few instances of correct third-person singular usage of modal auxiliaries, you might safely conclude that "cans," "mays," and other such forms are errors indicating that the learner has not distinguished modals from other verbs. But it is possible, because of the few correct instances of production of this form, that the learner is on the verge of making the necessary differentiation between the two types of verbs. You can thus appreciate the subjectivity of determining the difference between a mistake and an error in learner speech. That under­taking always bears with it the chance of a faulty assumption on the part of a teacher or researcher.

The fact that learners do make errors, and that these errors can be observed, analyzed, and classified to reveal something of the system oper­ating within the learner, led to a surge of study of learners' errors, called error analysis. Error analysis became distinguished from contrastive analysis by its examination of errors attributable to all possible sources, not just those resulting from negative transfer of the native language. Error analysis easily superseded contrastive analysis, as we discovered that only some of the errors a learner makes are attributable to the mother tongue, that learners do not actually make all the errors that contrastive analysis predicted they should, and that learners from disparate language back­grounds tend to make similar errors in learning one target language. Errors—overt manifestations of learners' systems—arise from several possible general sources: interlingual errors of interference from the native lan­guage, intralingual errors within the target language, the sociolinguistic context of communication, psycholinguistic or cognitive strategies, and no doubt countless affective variables.

As we have already seen, interlingual transfer is a significant source of error for all learners. The beginning stages of learning a second language are especially vulnerable to interlingual transfer from the native language, or interference. In these early stages, before the system of the second language is familiar, the native language is the only previous linguistic system upon which the learner can draw. We have all heard English learners say "sheep" for "ship," or "the book of Jack" instead of "Jack's book"; French learners may say "Je sais Jean" for "Je connais Jean," and so forth. All these errors art attributable to negative interlingual transfer. While it is not always clear that an error is the result of transfer from the native language, many such errors are detectable in learner speech. Fluent knowledge or even famil­iarity with a learner's native language of course aids the teacher in detecting and analyzing such errors.

The learning of a third language (and subsequent languages) pro vides an interesting context for research. Depending upon a number of fac­tors, including the linguistic and cultural relatedness of the languages and the context of learning, there are varying degrees of interlingual interfer­ence from both the first and second language to the third language, espe­cially if the second and third languages are closely related or the learner is attempting a third language shortly after beginning a second language.