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Date Posted: 17:53:47 05/07/07 Mon
Author: Fabio Vione
Subject: Peer Editing to Andrea Faria

Local and global mistakes

Teachers are always dealing with mistakes. It is part of their practice to expect students to make mistakes, to predict which mistakes students are bound to make, to help students become aware of their mistakes and even learn from them, among other things. If mistakes were once seen as an evil to be avoided at all costs, it is now known that they are an important part of the learning process and show that students are testing hypotheses, making generalizations, experimenting with the new items they are manipulating and so forth. This happens in basically all areas and could not be different in foreign language learning. As Tom McArthur states in A foundation course for language teachers, “We are all of us transitionally competent (or incompetent) in language, whatever the particular language we are using” (109). Language teachers know this very well, but still feel lost in the middle of an avalanche of points to consider before they decide on the best way to approach their students’ mistakes. Maybe it should be sensible to start by making a basic distinction between two main categories of mistakes: those that slightly affect communication and those which actually prevent communication. By making such a distinction, teachers can set priorities that will serve as basic guidelines before deciding which mistakes are worth correcting first and which can be dealt with later.

The first category of mistakes, known as local mistakes, involves errors that affect communication slightly, but do not prevent the utterance or message from being understood. Although they affect only a single constituent or few constituents in a sentence, they do not generate processing problems. In Aprendendo com os erros, Figueiredo cites mistakes in the use of verbal and noun inflexions, auxiliary verbs and quantifiers as local mistakes (99). The sentence “He have many money in bank” shows three local mistakes: a wrong verb form (“have” instead of “has”), a wrong quantifier (“many” instead of “a lot of” or “much”) and the absence of a definite article (“in bank” instead of “in the bank”). Despite having three local mistakes, the sentence is clear and the message unambiguous.

The second category of mistakes, called global mistakes, entails errors which make an utterance or message difficult to process because they affect the overall structure of the sentence. Figueiredo includes in this group the wrong order of main constituents of a sentence, absence or misuse of connectors, inadequate use of deictics, misinterpretation of false cognates and literal translations (P) among other things. The following examples, taken from Figueiredo, show how global mistakes cause syntactic and semantic problems which make the message difficult or impossible to process: “I live with my sister and your husband and your son” (instead of “her husband and their son”), “We did a lapidation course” (instead of “we took a stone polishing course”), “I can count with him for the that to need” (instead of “I can count on him for whatever I need) (110-112).

As we can see, global mistakes are the ones that impair communication, either changing the meaning of sentences or simply resulting in utterances that are impossible to process. These should be, in terms of priority, the first sort of mistakes to tackle in language classrooms, due to the potential of misunderstanding they represent. Moreover, when the aim of language teaching is to achieve communicative competence, correcting all the mistakes our students make indistinctly is not only unreasonable, but also off-putting. As Julian Edge states in her book Mistakes and correction, “If the teacher wants accuracy above all things and never mind ideas the students express, then that teacher will get attempts at accuracy: no mistakes and no learning steps” (16).
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I couldn't find any mistake in your text, except for a minor coma that I think is missing. Superb written piece I would say, congratulations!

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