Me, You and Your Mistakes

Mistakes and errors. Errors and mistakes. Why do we say "She have" when we know it's "She has"? Why do we confuse the order of words, "Usually, I don't go out on Fridays" instead of "I don't usually go out on Fridays"? Why do we make mistakes and what can we do about them? That's a question that I have to ask myself every day as I try to help you improve your skills in English. It's a tough thing to do, because we need to find a balance between making sure you're speaking or writing correctly, but also making sure you feel confident and comfortable in the language. To that end, I want to share with you some of the techniques, and the research behind them, that I use in the class to help you. 

The first thing to decide is if someone has made a mistake or an error. But they're synonyms, you might say, there's no difference between them. Well, for us English teachers they are very different things. A mistake, for us, is when you know the correct form but for some reason you don't produce it properly on isolated occasions - we'll talk about those reasons a little later. An error is when you don't know the correct form, or you haven't learned it yet - these normally cause communication problems. Let's look at the two types individually after the jump.