LEARNER ERRORS
Teachers should approach learner errors in a constructive, supportive, positive, sympathetic manner since errors often reflect learners' linguistic development rather than language deficiencies. Teachers should also be flexible and open-minded concerning the actual language use. For example, such statements produced by some learners such as "My brother lives in Queensland for six years, and We've been in Melbourne yesterday" in activity 2 on page 15 in Alex McKnight(1994) illustrates the fact that for descriptive grammar, grammaticality is not attached to formality. It depends on the native speakers' judgment in considering whether a statement is grammatical and acceptable or not. Activity 1 on page 17 in the same text also reveals the fact that whether a statement is acceptable or not depends on the context. Some non-standard, ungrammatical utterances such as "I didn't say nothing" and "I never said nothing" would be acceptable as spoken language to certain groups of people. Teachers cannot say what is right or wrong but rather show both grammatical statements while making clear to learners that what makes statements sound correct or incorrect is the listeners' own social value. Language is also changing, especially spoken language, and so is 'standard English'. Both issues suggest to teachers that they should not correct every error. Besides, teachers must take into account the needs and abilities of individual learners as well as the type of error made. Error correction in fluency activities is different from that in accuracy activities. For fluency activities, teachers do not interrupt learners to give correction. Burt and Kiparsky(1972) feel that it is easy to destroy a learner's confidence with too many interruptions. Over-correction cuts off learners'sentences, causes them to lose their train of thought and prevents them from relating to a new sentence. Furthermore, teachers can help learners develop strong writing skills through editing techniques. In so doing, teachers identify learners' errors by marking the major errors with correction symbols that help learners identify their errors and fix them when they go through their texts a second time.
In addition, learners can be editors themselves when they work in pairs or exchange their texts. Errors should be corrected according to the proficiency level of the learners. From my teaching experience, I have applied several techniques in my writing course. I have corrected every error and therefore have discouraged many learners. Later, I have used the technique of underlining but not correcting errors and marking major errors with correction symbols. This technique has helped my EFL learners improve their grammatical accuracy. However, every learner cannot become a 'key' person in his or her own correction work in the learning process due to class size and time availability.