The growing perception of professional learning communities as an effective professional development approach needs to be supported with knowledge of how such communities create learning opportunities for teachers. Activities in professional learning communities are underpinned by collegial conversations that foster learning, and in this article…

This study investigates the effect of grammar-focused hands-on in-class data-driven learning (DDL) with a heavily contextualized corpus on the frequency of written errors attributable to common interlingual interference issues in low-intermediate Turkish learners (n = 30) of English. Items representing the most common Turkish-to-English…

From a constructivist perspective on learning, mistakes are seen as natural elements of learning processes. A supportive and constructive way of dealing with student mistakes has shown to affect students' individual motivation and learning performances in a favorable way. In classroom settings, however, making mistakes is not just a personal but…

The significance of errors in explicating Second Language Acquisition (SLA) processes led to the growth of error analysis in the 1970s which has since maintained its prominence in English as a second/foreign language (L2) research. However, one problem with this research is errors are often taken for granted, without problematising them and their…

Attitudes toward and approaches to error in language learning depend on one's point of view: strictly linguistic, pedagogical, or that of the learner. This last approach is that "one learns by making mistakes," and from that perspective, there is no absolute definition of error, but only an operative one. (MSE)

First language and second language learners have to learn through making mistakes. Foreign language learners do not have to learn, to anything like the same extent, in this way. Foreign language teachers should study students' mistakes in order better to understand how they are learning and mislearning. Teachers should try to avoid language…