Towards a (Painful?) Paradigm Shift: Language Teachers and the Notion of 'Error'

This paper examines the relationship between language teachers and the errors made by their students. Traditionally, errors reflect a deviation from a norm, which is a described or imagined standard form of linguistic behavior, and teachers are the repositories of that standard. Errors provide insights into processes of language acquisition, and offer teachers convenient strategies for classroom intervention. More than this, student errors – grammatical, phonological, lexical, pragmatic – continue to offer teachers a source of reflection, amusement, and even endearment, as professional teaching publications and Internet forums show. The appearance of contrastive analysis in the 1960s, the brief ascendancy of error analysis, and the ensuing development of inter-language studies, kept the focus firmly on the learner’s distance (ultimately unbridgeable) from native speaker competences, with the underlying message for the language teaching profession that the teacher’s role was to bring students as far as possible towards a native-speaker like competence – a default model of competence which was built into the rating scales of major testing organisations. This comfortable status quo was called into question by the can do approach adopted in the Common European Framework of Reference (2000), in which the focus shifted from learner error to learner competence, posing new challenges for curriculum designers and language testers. Nonetheless, a standard form of the language (usually ‘British English’ in Europe) continued to provide the target in coursebooks produced by the major publishers, and an ostensibly communicative approach continued to be the vehicle for a grammatical syllabus written in stone. But over the last decade further challenges have been posed by the explosion on the scene of English Lingua Franca (ELF) and the awareness that most interactions in English today are between non native speakers. ELF research increasingly shows that success in NNS interaction does not come from approximating native speaker norms, but rather from a range of collaborative strategies, linguistic, paralinguistic, and pragmatic. In this context, teachers and testers will increasingly have to redefine the notion of ‘error’ in the language classroom, an operation which for many teachers rooted in native speaker norms (most of them, according to recent surveys in both secondary and higher education) is likely to signify a painful paradigm shift.