SEDUC MT 2017 — Questão 41 · Língua Inglesa - Compreensão e Interpretação de Texto

For questions 40 to 45 read the text below:

Before the 1960’s, during the dominance of the

behaviouristic view upon language there existed a dominated

view of language to consider learners’ errors as something

undesirable. Making errors was seen as a sign of mislearning

and regarded as undesirable to proper processes of language

learning. According to the behaviouristic point of view, the reason

behind making errors lies in inadequate teaching methods which

if had been “perfect” they would never be committed. This way

of thinking was considered to be naive as there is nothing to

be called “perfect” methodology especially with the appearance

of the Universal Grammar concept proposed by Chomsky in

1965. The latter claimed that each human being has an innate

capacity that can guide him through a vast number of sentence

generation possibilities. Since then, a shift by language teachers

towards the cognitive approach has started. Chomsky’s theory

contributes in raising researcher’s interests about learners’

errors as a source of hypotheses formation. The importance

of errors in language learning was first advocated by Corder

(1967). He proved that strategies of L2 learners could be inferred

through the analysis of their errors and that could be helpful for

researchers of L2 learning process. Selinker (1992) highlighted

two fundamental contributions of Corder’s study in L2 learning.

The first one is that the learner’s errors are systematic and

the second is that they are not “negative” or “interfering” but a

positive factor, indicative of testing hypothesis.

Errors Correction in Foreign Language Teaching . Available from: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/318249645_Errors_Correction_in_Foreign_ Language_Teaching [accessed Aug 6, 2017].

Read the statements below:

I. Chomsky played an important role in driving researcher’s attention toward second language students’ errors.

II. The behaviouristic point of view towards errors is that they are natural and desirable in a classroom environment.

III. According to the author, there is no such thing as “perfect methodology”.

The CORRECT statements are: