Stubborn Mistakes

While I was grading the writing part of the 3rd mock exam, including translation and composition, I was puzzled by some stubborn mistakes students had made. Every year the mistakes reoccur. Though I know it is inevitable for students to have mistakes in their interlanguage, I was still wondering why students couldn’t avoid these mistakes. The spelling mistakes could have been avoided if the students had been familiar with the correspondence between sound and spelling and if they had said the words in their mind while writing. The following are some examples:

1. come true (*come ture…)

2. go abroad (*aboard)

P.S. Many students mispelled the word global in global economic recession. They spelled it as globle. If they had known that many adjectives ended with -al, not -le, they wouldn't have made the mistake.

As for the mistakes in word usage, reading and speaking a lot might have helped eliminate them. For example,

1. complain about the difficulties (*complain the difficulties)

2. There are some people choosing to /Some people choose to… (*There are some people choose to…)

3. in ten years /ten years from now (* after ten years /ten years later)

I still hold the belief that students should be encouraged to speak more English when learning English.