What are two things you would recommend to someone…….?

Last Saturday, I administered the final written test for the summer English conversation course which started in March this year. I had 65 students in one group while the other group consisted of 45 making a total of 110 in both classes.

It is natural to notice that EFL students make mistakes when they engage in classroom activities. In L2 learning, mistakes are divided into errors and slips. Errors generally occur when learners try to say something that is beyond their current level of language processing ability. However, if a learner is tired or emotionally disturbed, it is likely that such a learner uses a simple present to denote a past action. Eg. Yesterday, I go for a walk in the afternoon. But later, the learner knows what he/she said was wrong. So those kinds of mistakes are known as slips.

The role of error in L2 acquisition is a vast field which cannot be discussed in a blog like this. What I want to tell you is that EFL learners sometimes make funny mistakes when they speak as well as write. As I stated above, after the examination when I was marking the papers, I found a funny answer written by one student to a question in the English conversation final written test. The test was not very hard in that it included five parts to test different language skills. Part 3 included five divergent questions. Therefore, students were free to write their ideas or opinions concerning the questions posed. Of the five questions, one question was “What are two things you would recommend to someone who can’t sleep well?” It is expected that students should be able to give simple instructions on how to deal with life-related problems. I observed that many students had answered the question above well. Their instructions to someone who can’t sleep well included exercising, reading a book, listening to soft music, and so on. However, one student wrote a quite different answer to the question above. Please read the student’s answer below.

Even though it seems funny, what the student has intended is clear. The student in her answer refers to the role of grandparents in our families. There cannot be a single individual who has not been lulled to sleep especially by a grandmother in his life time when it was very young. I come to believe this particular student must have been very much influenced by his/her grandparents. This may be one of the reasons why the student in this particular answer thought that the grandparents could help someone with sleep-related disorders to overcome them.