In the context of Foreign Language (FL) teaching, there has been an emphasis on understanding the
underlying causes of errors, which may include the transfer of patterns from the native language to the
foreign language. In FL learning, what we believe to be or not to be an error is often related to our own
way of acting in the situations we experience in our daily lives. In this sense, it is important to consider
the fact that learners and teachers are individuals who have their particular ways of thinking and acting
regarding what constitutes an error within the teaching and learning process, as well as regarding why,
how, and when to correct it.
SILVA, S. V. D.; FIGUEIREDO, F. J. Q. D. Erro e correção: as crenças de dois professores de escola pública e de alguns de seus alunos.
Revista Brasileira de Linguística Aplicada, n. 6, p. 113-141, 2006 (adaptado).
In a Brazilian English classroom, a student says, “I am going to the shopping.” The teacher interrupts and
corrects the student, saying, “No, in English, we say ‘I am going to the mall,’ not ‘shopping’.” By doing this
correction, the teacher assumed his own dialect or regional variation of English as the standard or correct
one. However, in Brazilian Portuguese, it’s common to use the term “shopping” to refer to a shopping mall.
Considering the text, we can infer the purpose behind the correction demonstrated in this case stud