It is not uncommon for English language lessons to favour communication over accuracy: real life is nothing like a classroom! In real-life situations, when you make a mistake in the language you are learning, context provides ample information as to what the intended message is. In fact, most of the time, impeccable accuracy is not needed at all! “Don’t worry about making mistakes, ” I used to tell my English language students. “Communicating is the most important thing!”

While making mistakes when trying to master a language might seem counter-intuitive, letting learners freely communicate and negotiate meaning is key to success. A learner who communicates a lot while making a few mistakes is much more likely to develop confidence for dealing with real-life situations than a learner who communicates very little because they’re afraid of making any. In communicative language teaching, for example, the teacher is tasked with both encouraging the learner to express themselves and with providing corrective feedback in a way that is not obstructive to communication.

This means that if a learner says, “I go swimming last night, ” it is much more effective to respond with, “Oh, that’s nice, you went swimming. What did you do after?” rather than, “No! You went swimming! Use past simple for past events!” – the former encourages the learner to continue their narrative while the latter is much more likely to make the learner stop in their tracks, re-evaluate the context, and think twice before expressing themselves again in the future, for the fear of making a mistake again. Teachers need to be careful not to parrot back everything the students say in this manner, of course, but the technique can be an effective method of acknowledging the content of a student’s response, while also providing feedback on accuracy.

The importance of the freedom to make mistakes in language learning is also supported by research in psychology, which suggests that learners who try a task without having mastered it completely experience improved retention of new information. A similar experiment in the context of language learning also indicates that the process of making mistakes activates a greater network of related knowledge in the brain, which leads to superior learning outcomes.

It is believed that the key to help learners feel relaxed and ready for communicating freely in the classroom is authenticity. This means that there should be both a real communicative need for a learner to speak and the authentic reaction from those around to what the learner has said.

Here are a few ways of how such authentic communicative interactions can be practiced in the classroom:

• surround learners with the English language – encourage them to speak to you and each other in English;

• don’t worry about diverging from topics that are not strictly covered in your lesson plan;

• model communication by telling your students stories and anecdotes about your own life and encourage them to do the same;

• let your learners have fun with English – give them colloquial expressions to try and ask them to share some expressions

; • do not overcorrect – make a note of errors and cover it in subsequent lessons;

• avoid the temptation to turn what was intended as speaking practice into a full-on grammar lesson.

While easier said than done, especially when the outcome of an exam is at stake, it is worth remembering that people that our learners might come to interact with outside of the classroom are driven by the natural desire to understand the people they communicate with. This is especially powerful when practiced in the context of a classroom. They set the learners up for success in real-life communication. In other words, when communication is the goal, mistakes are secondary, and that’s real life, isn’t it?

Adapted from: https://wwwcambridgeenglish.org/blog/mistakes-help-you-learnfreedom-to-fail-in-games-and-language-learning/

There are a lot of common misconceptions about fossilization and language development. It's impossible to correct all of them in a post here, but I'll address a few that have been mentioned below.

Fossilization is a stage at which a second language speaker seems to cease making progress toward becoming more targetlike in his or her use of the language, so a "learning plateau" is a reasonable analogy. The comparison wherein "the L2 learner has his own linguistic system" that's still influenced by L1 and other things is known as the "interlanguage." The question researchers cannot conclusively answer is whether or not that "plateau" is reversible after a certain point, be it age, fluency level, etc., in order to start making progress again.

Different people are motivated by different things, which range from need (to pass a test, to get a job, to watch movies without subtitles, to make friends, etc.) to learning style (preferring to study from texts, liking/disliking impromptu, small-talk with people just to practice, preference for/against learning formal rules, and aptitude). It is easy to remember verb conjugations. There is no single formula.

Finding someone who can correct your errors tactfully and effectively most certainly does not need to be demotivating, depressing or draining whatsoever. I'm a very fluent non-native speaker of Spanish, and I actively request that my native speaker (NS) friends correct me when I make a mistake, or use a phrase that sounds funny in their dialect, etc. How else will I learn? It's fascinating to learn little details like that now after so many years. As long as they don't do it in a mocking or condescending way, or at a socially inappropriate time, why wouldn't I want their help? Of course, if you correct a beginner every time they try to utter a sentence, it could be discouraging - and obnoxious - but everything in moderation.

One of the biggest cognitive challenges is whether or not L2 speakers can learn to consciously notice differences between their L2 efforts and the way a NS talks. There are decades of research on this (my own included) and I'll gladly give references if anyone actually cares. Noticing falls into two broad categories. First, the ability to "notice the gap, " i.e. hear a NS say a sentence and think, "Hmm, I understand what he meant but I've never heard that word before; it must mean ___" or "I know what he meant but it would not have occurred to me to say it that way; I'll try to remember that for later." The second is the ability to "notice the hole, " i.e. when the L2 learner is trying to speak/ write and realizes that his "interlanguage" lacks a word, sound or structure needed to accurately convey his own thought. If he can seek the input necessary to fill the hole, he has a much stronger chance of acquiring it. The thought processes involved during that moment are holding the forms (or lack thereof) in working memory, and the longer it stays there for further processing, the greater the possibility that it is retained in long-term memory for later use. The NS interlocutor can help promote noticing through corrective feedback (also a subject of decades of research, for which I'm also happy to provide resources if anyone is genuinely interested.)

I have been using a variety of strategies for years as a language coach when working with my clients, whether helping IT executives from India and Egypt learn to write more grammatically accurate e-mail or helping priests from Nigeria improve prosodic aspects of their pronunciation (i.e. stress and intonation patterns.) Each person is different. I have found no evidence to support the argument that a person who has fossilized cannot begin to make progress again toward a more target-like L2 use at least in some areas, with the right motivation, input and effort. The question is only about how much progress, in what areas, in how much time, and through what methods.

Adapted form: https://www.quora.com/How-do-people-overcome-fossilization-andachieve-native-like-fluency-in-second-language-acquisition Acesso em 22/09/2023