Virginio Gracci, Italy

While learning a language everybody make mistakes, from infants in their native tongue to everyone else, either very young or adult, wanting to somehow communicate in a language different from their mother tongue.

Making mistakes while learning (not only a language) is probably in-born in human beings (and in animals, too), so that if we want to learn something we need to be trained and corrected till the aim is attained, since “we learn from our mistakes”, as the old saying goes.

Here I do not want to even hint at the various approaches to learning a language and techniques for correction that have been proposed over the years by scholars, all with their share of truth, since I am convinced that every person has their own mental strategies and habits for acquiring knowledge, and learning in general terms is surely the outcome of an inner process that cannot be the same for everybody (That is why teachers' lessons should never be addressed to classes but to individuals).

I am of the opinion that the more naturally one learns and is corrected the better. Teachers should prompt their students only when asked (sometimes they only need to meet their “imploring” eyes to intervene suitably to unblock the situation). It is what usually happens with parents while helping their young children to speak. They intervene in a natural way to prompt them with key-words or clues to sentences they are unable to utter, without making a mountain out of it.

I have never heard of parents boxing their young children's ears only because of their bad pronunciation, or because they forget the S of the third person singular of the present simple, or because they are not able to utter the ED of the simple past properly. But this is what usually occurs in class (and I do not mean this only metaphirically- ears do get boxed) when teachers abruptly interrupt their students to correct them in their first attempts at saying something. Sometimes they speak in their place or even anticipate (inconclusively) what their students are trying to say in the language they are learning, often forming a sort of background of meaningless singsong talk which will only contribute to keep the students from putting two and two together.

Instead teachers' interventions should aim at identifying for each of their students the best attitudes to help them find their own way to self learning and self correcting, as parents usually do with their children.

Things can be even worse when we turn to writing, because of the impressive effect that “mental images” – as Antoine De La Garanderie (Les Profils Pédagogiques, Paris, Editions du Centurion, 1989) would call them – will have in the learners' minds. Through an excessive correction students can become firmly convinced that they will never learn the language properly (as if perfection existed in speaking or writing a language), in spite of their efforts to achieve the aim (You'll remember George Mikes' experience with the English language? But his was only a funny book (How to be an Alien) written to make fun of the British by over-stating their manias).

Usually the fear of making mistakes takes hold of learners and dogs their steps, preventing them from saying the simplest things in the language studied (often with passion and tenacity, as it was in my case)

I have experienced these negative impacts of correction. I was educated in Italy and the Italian system of education, being mainly based on factual rather than working knowledge, invited this sort of problem. Students of my generation were asked to report what was written in books rather than express their own opinions and points of view, and show the levels of their operating abilities reached in the subjects studied.

In learning English we were taught plenty of grammar rules about the language, rather than the language itself. I remember studying English in the same way as I used to study Maths or Physics. What we did in class was mainly written and everything was always compared to our mother tongue (and sometimes even to Latin).

Teachers used to underline mistakes on the blackboard (on which we had to write our English when we were tested to get our oral marks!) with coloured chalk so that the rest of the class could see each person's errors. In tests and exercise books mistakes were marked either in red or blue or both (bicoloured pencils, chiefly used by teachers, have been marketed with success in Italy for a long time), and the shades of the colour were more or less intense according to the “seriousness” of the mistakes.

What was the result of all this? For a long time I had problems with using English out of the school environment. For a long time after taking my degree and passing all exams to be a state professional teacher, my dreams at night were populated with exercise books and test sheets showing long deeply coloured lines, flying around the ceiling of my bedroom.

It took me more than one visit to Britain to realize that the language was something different from Maths, that I could not do much with all the rules I had learnt, that the British were human beings just like me, and not perfect robots speaking a perfect mechanical language. I was really amazed when I ingenuously discovered that the British themselves made mistakes while speaking the language of “the Bard of Avon”, as some of my teachers used to define it reverently. But I felt even more distressed when I realized that British people paid little or no attention to a lot of the things that had made my teachers fly into a disparaging rage and led them to orgies with their red and blue pencils.

How have I been able to get rid of all this (if, indeed, I have completely)? As one can imagine, the process was slow and involved various experiences, comparisons, confirmations and self-awareness. But the last drops that emptied the vase (I hope they were the last) came out not long ago at an international conference that I attended, in which English was the language of communication. 0ne of the lecturers (a renowned scholar from a non-English speaking country) gave his talk and spoke for about an hour without anyone in the audience being able to understand a word of what he was saying. His English was so bad that no one even listened to him speaking from the microphone, but read from the copies of his speech he had handed out before starting his lecture. At the end, to my surprise, he was the one who was better appreciated. In fact everybody seemed to be quite satisfied with the contents of his lecture.

What I realized from this episode (which acted in me as a liberating outburst) was the oldest of truths, that in our world there is enough room for everyone, notwithstanding their good or (a bit) less good utterances, given that what one has to convey is always far more important than the way it is got across.

VIRGINIO GRACCI