I remember way back in the late 20th century, I was in a French language lesson doing a dictation, which was one element of our lessons I particularly despised. I did my best and handed in my written interpretation of the sounds I’d heard. The total number of words was about the same as this paragraph that’s ending right here.
When I received my test back, I had scored a grand total of 0/20, Zero out of twenty. Maybe you would assume that everything was wrong. It wasn’t. Most of it was correct, but the teacher had started with a maximum of 20 points and deducted one for every error. The 40 or so words that were correct were not taken into account and I received a grand total of nothing. Perfection was the goal.
At the start of my language training career, I was scolded by a boss of mine for being too positive about marking someone’s essay. I had pointed out the errors but I had committed the sin of praising the writer for some of the good elements of their essay. The boss didn’t want any praise as the text had too many errors.
Thanks to such attitudes to language acquisition, I have continued my career for several decades. I believe that learning a language is a process which requires trial and error for us to learn it well. If you’ve had children, or spent time around little kids – for example, younger siblings or cousins – the approach that parents and other adults take when correcting the little ones is not punitive but encouraging and involves fun and repetition. All of us went through this process and most of us are pretty good at communicating in our own languages thanks to this approach.
Consider another example: scientific and technological progress leave a trail of errors in their wake and the people driving that progress learn from the mistakes and redesign, rebuild and retry. Mistakes help them learn how to improve at the next attempt and they can receive Nobel prizes for the final success.
Making mistakes when we are learning languages should be celebrated. It is an important part of the learning and improvement process. I certainly would have been happier with a 60% result in my dictation rather than zero – it would have encouraged me to strive to reach a higher mark the next time round. As it was, I decided that I was no good at learning languages like so many school kids before me and so many since then. I only proved myself wrong several years later when I found myself communicating in Polish…
Andy Highton Language Training 