Handling of Students' Expression Errors in th

Handling of Students' Expression Errors in the Teaching

of College English

The phenomenon of "mute English" and "deaf English" among today's college students is the inevitable result of the traditional aim of English teaching, which is for accuracy. Today's society requires English teachers to pay more attention to develop students' ability to understand the different modes of thinking between the two languages, so that students can "acquire" the ability to use English rather than "learn" how to use it. The focus of English teaching is to cultivate the habits of using language. Students should be encouraged to think and express in the English way actively. In this process, mistakes are inevitable, while teachers should try their best to tolerate them and start error analysis procedures to improve them afterwards.

Key words:

different modes of thinking, English teaching, error analysis, tolerance, improve

There is a general trend in college English classes to treat English as a second language course and to emphasize learners' learning of the language. Affected by this trend, vocabulary and grammar have become the focus of English teaching and even the whole teaching content. Students are required to use "standard" English to avoid grammar and vocabulary mistakes, which become the most concentrated problem. The defects of this teaching mode are obvious. Students may get high scores in multiple-choice tests of four choices, but the actual communicative function of language is neglected, resulting in the weakening of students' language application ability and even the phenomenon of so-called "mute English" and "Deaf English".

In view of this phenomenon, many college English teachers have put forward the concept of "communicative" teaching method and put it into practice actively, which has achieved good results. The "communicative" teaching method makes teaching and students' participation in class lively and higher. Furthermore, their listening and speaking ability has been greatly practiced and their language practical application skills have been significantly improved.

However, a certain number of students do not reap the benefits mentioned above in "communicative" English classes. The main factor that prevents them from participating in classroom interactions is from the fear that they may make mistakes in their presentation. For extroverted students, such fear is often easy to overcome, and several mistakes cannot dim their enthusiasm to participate in class communication. For students who are introverted, this fear can be an insurmountable obstacle. Even a single or small misexpression can silence them and make them the "audience" and "spectator" of the class.

Therefore, in the face of students' mistakes, it’s not a good choice to correct them immed iately. Otherwise, students' mistakes will be publicized and amplified in front of all members of the class, forming a kind of "punishment" for wrong expressions. At the same time, this "punishment" serves as a "warning" to other students who are preparing to speak, greatly reinforcing their existing fears.

A better approach would be to be tolerant when students make mistakes and try to highlight the merits of what they say. This will undoubtedly help those introverted students to overcome their fears and motivate them to participate more in class discussions, thus forming an environment of common improvement and progress for all students to the greatest extent.

It is inevitable for students to make some mistakes in class. Let’s make it clear from the perspective of psycholinguistics. When psycholinguists discuss the parts of the human brain associated with language, they often refer to the Broca and Wernicke regions. The former is mainly responsible for language generation, while the latter is mainly responsible for information collection and meaning processing. In 1997, Joy Hersh, an American neuroscientist, compared two groups of subjects and found that adults use different brain regions when learning a second