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s about mistakes
Attitudes to errors can be either negative or positive. Mistakes were traditionally considered negative by behaviorists. Before the 1960s, the behaviorist who approaches to language teaching and learning mainly governed the field of methodology. From the behaviorist perspective, procedures of learning a language are similar to either human being’s other habit -formation, like the learning of riding a bicycle, or something like a pigeon’s behavior. So B. F. Skinner tried to apply the idea of conditioning to the way of how human beings acquire language and concluded that language was not a mental phenomenon but a behavior. In order to form language habits, teachers often use imitation, reinforcement, repetition in English teaching until the formations of conditioning has been realized. Based on this theory, the complex language learning was divided into a series of habits, which were practiced until learners could produce something automatically. Of course, some of the traditional approaches are very effective in foreign language study and are still applied in language teaching and learning, even in communicative textbooks. In this way, traditional methodologists suggested that learning a language in small steps should avoid mistakes. Here mistakes were seen as unsuccessful learning while correct utterances were immediately praised.
But at the end of the 1950s, some changes in idea about errors took place. In 1959, Chomsky started a strong attack upon Skinner by asking many questions about phenomena beyond Skinner’s expla-nation. Chomsky defined the native speakers’perfectknowledge about the language as competence and made a distinction between competence and performance. Competence is what is grammatically right while performance is what actually occurs in practicaluse. In Chomsky’s opinion, language is not a form of behaviour but a complicated rule - based system which can make native speakers produce an infinite number of sentences with a finite number of grammatical rules (Littlewood, 1984). Although Chomsky had not intended to use this thought in language teaching, the idea came to be applied in the classroom that students should be given opportunities to construct their own utterances on the basis of the comprehension of a rule. In this case some mistakes are seen as positive because they are a form of construction. While using the language, students will also probably produce errors since their hypotheses about the language are wrong or incomplete. To create language to express their ideas is itself a kind of practice forwards. In this situation, most of the mistakes be-long to slips or attempts and the cause may be mostlydue to overgeneralization. How can teachers treat such production of a learner’s negatively? Chomsky also pointed out that native speakers make mistakes (slips) when speaking. Influenced by Chomsky’s theories of ‘performance errors’(Littlewood, 1984)
and the application of his idea, in modern communicative teaching methodology mistakes can be largely tolerated when speech can convey meaning although there may be some slips in it. For example, if a student utters“Where you went yesterday?”, although a linguistic mistake has been made, no one has difficulty in understanding the meaning. So teachers tend to ignore such mistakes where fluency is emphasized. Another similar example is as follows: before students read passage about volcano’s, the teacher tried to elicit students by asking:
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