Being Corrected I like to be corrected. For me it's something logical: You make a mistake, you have to be corrected, whether you correct yourself or someone else corrects you. I'm not only talking abo

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Angel A

Being Corrected I like to be corrected. For me it's something logical: You make a mistake, you have to be corrected, whether you correct yourself or someone else corrects you. I'm not only talking about language learning mistakes, but mistakes in general. Some people don't think the same as me, they don't like to be corrected. Sometimes that's understandable. I mean, being constantly corrected can be discouraging or might make you feel kind of stupid if you're getting corrected by a mean person. I felt that way before as well. However, I think being closed to corrections can be very stupid, because it hinders you from progressing and getting better at anything. Now I want to mention a couple of anecdotes that I think are very interesting. Some months ago, I was in a English/Spanish group, and this girl who was learning Spanish got kind of sad because the owner of the group and I were correcting her a lot. She told us that she thought she knew Spanish until she joined this group and that she felt discouraged because she was being corrected a lot. I told her that I didn't mean to make her feel bad, that I was trying to help her and don't get discouraged, because her Spanish was actually pretty good. Learning a language can be very hard, so making mistakes is pretty easy. Besides, I told her, ´´don't see this as a bad thing, look at it as an opportunity to improve. Now you have people who can help you whenever you want´´. So she calmed down and kept on learning, and I tried to be a little less strict because I knew that being corrected can be annoying, but didn't stop helping her. Then I met this person who hung up on me over a correction. He was completely mispronouncing a word, I tried to help him, I wrote down the word so it would be easier for him to say it. Then, he just hung up, and said that I was trying to make him sound like a native speaker and that I was being too hard on him, I tried to explain that that wasn't true, but he just stopped talking to me. That's simply dumb. Thanks for reading and please correct me if I made a mistake.

Corrections · 5

Being Corrected

To be honest, I like to be corrected. For me it's something logical. You make a mistake, you have to corrected, whether you correct yourself or someone else corrects you. I'm not only talking about language learning mistakes, but also any mistake that we might make in our life.

Some people don't think the same as me, they don't like to be corrected. Sometimes that's understandable. I mean, when you are being constantly corrected can be discouraging or you might make you feel kind of stupid if you're getting corrected by a mean person. I felt that way before as well. However, I think being closed to corrections can be very stupid, because you don't really get better at anything nor progress in anything.

Now I want to mention a couple of anecdotes that I think are very interesting.

Some months ago I was in a English/Spanish group, and this girl who was learning Spanish got kind of sad because the owner of the group and I were correcting her a lot, she told us that she thought she knew Spanish until she joined this group and that she felt discouraged because she was being corrected a lot. I told her that I didn't mean to make her feel bad, that I was trying to help her and don't get discouraged, because her Spanish was actually pretty good, but learning a language can be very hard, so mistakes are pretty easy (1). Besides, I told her ´´don't see this as a bad thing, look at it as an opportunity to improve. Now you have people who can help you whenever you want´´. So she calmed down and kept on learning, and I tried to be a little less strict because I knew that being corrected can be annoying, but didn't stop helping her.

Then I met this person who hung up on me over a correction. He was completely mispronouncing a word, I tried to help him, I wrote the word down so it would be easier for him to read it, then he just hung up, and said that I was trying to make him sound like a native speaker and that I was being too hard on him, I tried to explain that that wasn't true, but he just stopped talking to me. In my opinion, that's simply dumb.

Thanks for reading and please correct me if I made a mistake.

Muy bien, tu escribes muy bien y tus ideas son, en mi opinión, cien por cien correcto. Piensa de un niño, que siempre le dice a su madre. “Mama, me gusta dos dulces”. “No, chico es Gustan”. Necesitamos ser corregido.

Esta oración, en mi opinión pude ser 2 oraciones. He notado que latinos escriben oraciones demasiado largo.

If two people are new to being conversation partners, I think it's best if each of them explains to the other person what would be helpful to them. Some people may welcome hearing lots of corrections; others may ask for corrections about some things, but not other things (for example, "Please don't correct my verb conjugations because I know I still need to study them more. But I would like to know when I should use different vocabulary -- I love leaning new words."). Or perhaps your new partner may not feel confident at all about speaking in Spanish -- and simply talking to a native Spanish speaker and discovering that the other person was able to understand them could feel like a huge success for that day. The fact that they did not receive corrections does not mean they did not learn anything -- their brain was probably exercising its "Spanish muscles" with great effort to put together all the sentences that they said. And they were also learning by hearing your fluent Spanish.

Thank you very much for your words, Heather. it seems like you're a pretty good teacher ;)

This post resonates with me. I have been teaching English for some time and living in non-anglophone countries for over 4 years. I find that I never corrected (and still do not correct) my friends who do not speak English as a mother tongue because I know that I am making mistakes, before in French and now in Spanish, and they are not correcting me. I know this is because we are having an everyday conversation and to correct each other even though we understand perfectly what each other means would just interrupt our time together. With students and in language exchanges, it is different. Corrections must be made because this is how we learn more. One way I found to make sure that I'm not "over-correcting" or being intimidating to my students is to wait until they have finished their sentence or speaking about a specific topic, and then asking them if they'd like to have their English (or French) corrected. This allows them to complete their part and still have corrections. And it sounds like the guy who hung up on you may have been embarrassed, and that's not your fault. Usually, if pronunciation is the problem, I try and help the student and if they really cannot pronounce it (because our mouths can't all make the same sounds) I'll give them some mouth exercises to try for next class and we move on. I appreciate correction! Especially when I was learning French, as I kept pronouncing it like Spanish! Good luck in your future endeavors of teaching and correct away (in my humble opinion).

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