We humans commit a lot of linguistic blunders for different reasons: nervousness, quick talking, because we are in process of mastering the language, etc. The faculty of being able to go back to what we said or wrote; realize that we committed a mistake; and finally correct ourselves is a faculty that just humans have.Imagine you have a beautiful essay that you are going to print out right now; you checked your essay, you made proofreading and on the screen it looks just perfect (learned system)… but, when you print it out, you realize that you ran out of printer’s ink and your essay looks like hieroglyphic… The problem is not in the formulation, the problem is on the transmission (acquired system).
We humans work the same way, if you are an adult and you commit a mistake, it’s not because you don’t know the rules or because you are not able to talk or write in your mother tongue; it’s because you thought it quickly and you tried to say the things in the exact moment you thought of them. The interesting part here is that we can realize of this and change what you wrote or retell what you said in an accurate way.
When we were kids, whenever we committed a mistake, everyone around us wanted to correct us! But as we grew up, we became even able to correct other’s!
For example, when I wrote this article, I committed plenty of spelling mistakes, but as soon as I finished the wrong spelled word, I realized of the mistakes and I corrected them, this tell s us that there is a cycle we follow in our brain called feedback loop, which consists in:
Stephen Krashen:
First Psycholinguist that tried
to explain how the Language
Acquisition Device works and
make us able to optimize our
language acquisition as adults.
Usually, we (using our learned system) model a sentence before saying it. According to Stephen Krashen, we use self-monitoring and self-correction when we correct a sentence after it is uttered.However, there are three conditions for the monitor model to be used:
• Know the rules: This implies that the speaker had been trained on the language.
• Focused on correctness: This could be difficult for the speaker because they will need to focus in meaning and form at the same time: rules make up only a small portion of our language competence.
• Speaker will need slow down the conversation in order to have time to use the monitor model.
Krashen recommended using the monitor model when it does not interfere with communication (as in writing).
So, next time you listen to your president saying “I were there!” or “He have been here!” just take it easy! Remember they are humans too, and that they surely felt like their whole nervous system started shivering!
Mind Explorer/ October, 2013 7