Common mistakes in English

This post is about common mistakes in English. There are two pieces of interesting research into learning and teaching English. One of them says that students learn more if someone else is corrected by the teacher than if they are corrected. The other found out that students learn and remember more vocabulary if the words are not connected in any way (they do not create so called lexical set).

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Combining these two findings it seems logical that students could learn and remember a lot if they were presented with a haphazard collection of someone else’s corrected mistakes. So, during an exam I collected several mistakes which I will present in a mind map and correct them and explain. I hope that students will learn a lot from these.

The post contains a mind map and two games to give the students a chance to learn from the mistakes other students made.

Here are six mistakes my students made during an exam. The mistakes are in the bubbles closest to the center. In the second bubble there is the correct version of the given sentence and there is an explanation at the end of each branch.

If you think you will never make these mistakes, you can try the following games:

The first game is an HTML5 quiz. Try to choose only the correct sentences and if you pass the test you can play the game called Tower Defence. Both of these can be played on your mobile phone or iPad.

If you want to display the quiz in a new window click on the button below:

The second game will play only on your desktop as it is in Flash. It is called Hoopshoot and your task is to choose a correct sentence and then score a basket. Good luck.