Innovation in Language Learning

The following questions have remained an endless topic in foreign language teaching: whether a learner’s linguistic mistakes should be corrected? Which mistakes to correct? When to correct? How to correct and by whom? The interlanguage theory proposed in 1970s has, without doubt, brought instructive guide and god-given gospel either in theory or in practice. This theory tells us that, mistakes are a necessary objective phenomenon in the process of language learning, and are symbol of a learner acquiring a second language. Mistakes are not a manifest of low capacity on the part of a learner, and on the contrary, not making mistakes would not enable a learner to learn a foreign language well.
The study and analysis of the errors made by second or foreign language learners has been a significant subject of study for a long stretch of time. But, in spite of the fact that a lot of preventive measures have been taken, some errors are bound to occur. Such being the case much care should be exercise to correct them closely and productively. In language teaching, linguistic mistakes are unavoidable, and how to deal with these mistakes is the first issue for a teacher to face. Iranian traditional English teaching paid special attention on linguistic accuracy. That is, whenever a mistake is discovered, it should be corrected immediately. The attitude of “error-correcting wrong once discovered” results in the fact that students lose opportunities for learning and utilizing a language, and their linguistic creative capacity is  seriously restrained, which brings about the so-called “Deaf-mute English” phenomenon. Under such a circumstance, voice for teaching revolution constantly, and a new teaching approach targeting at cultivating students’ communicative capacity -communicative approach comes into being. Due to the fact that communicative approach is introduced based on the denial at traditional teaching approach, quite lots of hypercorrection phenomena appear: in order that students could more speak and practice, teachers usually ignore their mistakes. Although they can run off at the mouth, mistakes flow. It seems that they speak fluently, but not accurately, not able to achieve exactly communicative effect.

Keywords: error – correction , self-error-correction, grammar learning;