Author: Mario Rinvolucri
Last saved by: Mary
Company: Pilgrims Ltd

Short Article 8

How students correct themselves

Mario Rinvolucri, Pilgrims

In this workshop, held at the 8^th SEAL Conference*, Mario Rinvolucri worked with the participants on the findings of recent neurological research into brain functioning.

The anterior cingulate cortex (ACC)

It appears from research by Michael Coles, at the University of Illinois, that the ACC, which lies just under the frontal lobes, produces intense nerve impulses when people make mistakes, be they tiping…whoops….typing errors, mispronounced words or social gaffes.
While Coles believes that the ACC allows the person to correct their mistake, other researchers disagree.

Carter, a psychiatrist, and Cohen, a neuro-scientist, both at Pittsburgh University, used MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging) to map the brains of people making judgements about sequences of letters. First, the subjects got used to certain letter patterns and then, suddenly, these changed and the ACC immediately fired up, both when the subject gave a correct answer and when they were partially correct.

Carter and Cohen’s interpretation was that the ACC’s activity signalled conflict and confusion. They suggest that the ACC detects complexity of operation but does not compare the given answer to the correct one.

In recent experiments (1997) by Coles, Miltner and Braun, subjects were given tests in which they could not tell when they had gone wrong. Their ACC’s stayed calm. Then they were given feedback, which immediately produced high levels of activity in the ACC.

Is the ACC capable of detecting and correcting errors, or does it react to a conflict between two or more ways of doing something , or does it simply respond to feedback on errors offered from outside? As yet there are no definitive answers, but other studies have shown that people with Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder have hyper functioning ACC’s as they wash their clean hands over and over again, or drive back to check if the gas is off for the fifth time.

John Allen, of the University of Arizona, has found that socially-badly-adjusted people whose behaviour is characterised by withdrawal, show very weak ACC signals when they make mistakes while doing simple laboratory tasks. Could it be that people with very weak error signals are more likely to steal, for example, because they do not have any internal sense that it might be wrong? 
None of this brain research is conclusive, but it is thrilling to know that there may be a relatively precise location in the brain acting as a sort of error-correction clearing house, and that it is this part of the brain that teachers are addressing (or not ) when they intervene / interfere and point out students’ mistakes.

I would dearly love to know how the ACC of a given student reacts to the following forms of language correction:

. The teacher makes a side-to-side hand gesture just after the error is pronounced;

.a fellow student models the correct answer;

. The teacher models the correct answer;

.the teacher whispers the correction into the student’s ear;

.other students laugh at the mistake.

If we take the Howard Gardner’s frame of multiple intelligences and think of a learner with an acute linguistic intelligence, is his ACC going to be firing much harder during a language class than in a history lesson? How about the case of Earl Stevick’s lathophobic aphasia, in which a person is so scared of making mistakes in the target language that he is unable to get any words out at all? Does this person’s ACC go wild, like the ACC of the Obsessive-Compulsive sufferer?

In addition, we also looked at how you can use NLP tools to help a learner gain awareness of how, psychologically, they correct language mistakes. For more on this, see ‘How do second language learners correct themselves’, Rinvolucri, IATEFL Newsletter, Spring, 1998.

If a good workshop is one that offers solutions, then this was a rank bad one. If one reasonable workshop function is to raise questions in one field derived from research in another, then this was a fascinating workshop.

*from the SEAL (Society for Effective and Affective Learning) Conference Proceedings, Warwick, April 1999

A summary of recent ACC research came out in ‘Ooops, Sorry’ by Kathryn Brown, New Scientist, 13 February, 1999.

SOME NLP BOOKS

Genie S. Laborde, Influencing with Integrity, (Syntony Publishing, California).
Simple clear, East Coast USA introduction to NLP, focussing towards the business world.)

Joseph O’Connor and John Seymour, Mandala, Introducing Neuro-Linguistic-Programming (Harper Collins,1990).
(Best known European introduction to NLP- short but dense and complete.)

Revell and Norman, In Your Hands (Saffire Press,1998).
(Aimed at helping language teachers with self-management, and dealing with themselves in the presence of the students.) 

Revell and Norman, Handing Over (Saffire Press, 1999)
(Aimed at language students. Exercises drawn from NLP.)

Robert Dilts et al, Tools for Dreamers, Strategies for Creativity and the Structure of Innovation (Meta Publications, Cuopertino Cal, 1991).
(A brilliant book by the No. 3 in the World NLP ranking.)

Ed. Sydney Rosen, My voice shall go with you, the teaching tales of Milton Erickson ( W.W. Norton, 1982).
(An account of the work of the man who saw the ‘father’ of NLP.)

Michael Grinder, Righting the Educational Conveyor Belt (Metamorphous Press, Portland, Oregon, 1991).
(Application of NLP to United States secondary classrooms)

BRAIN NEUROLOGY

Rita Carter, Mapping the Mind (Seven Dials, Orion Publishing, 1999).
(A clear and detailed guide for the lay person interested in brain neurology.)

Antonio Damasio, The feeling of What Happens Body, Emotions and the Making of Consciousness (Heinemann,1999).
(An inspired populariser of the ideas he himself has discovered.)