The experience of error in adult language learning

Language learning is thought of as a continuous process of learning from our mistakes: producing incorrect utterances, to which proficient speakers offer correction or feedback. However, there is much scholarly debate regarding what mistakes and errors are and how language learners learn from them. This dissertation aims to contribute to the scholarly discussions on the topic by approaching the question of error in language learning from a distinctly educational angle, which highlights the existential and ethical dimensions of committing, and learning from, one’s errors in the context of adult language learning. Drawing on scholarly discussions in second language acquisition research, educational ethics, pragmatism and phenomenology, it argues that rather than the mere realization of epistemic or linguistic failure, the experience of error is a complex process in which the student’s very subjectivity is transformed. Such an experience is twofold, including an intersubjective, discursive and normative dimension, corresponding to the Hegelian notion of Erfahrung, as well as a first-person, subjective and existentially significant aspect for the individual (Erlebnis). In addition, this dissertation examines possibilities of attending educationally to the ethically and existentially charged experience of error in language learning. First, drawing on Husserl’s notions of epoché and the phenomenological reduction, I suggest an approach that allows students to redescribe and narrate the first-person experience of error in an educationally productive way, shifting the emphasis from the sense of linguistic ‘failure’ to a view of error as a necessary step in the development of knowledge and learning. Secondly, in discussing the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty on expression in language and Levinas’s notion of welcoming, respectively, I claim that educators can attend to students’ experience of error as creative forays into the new language that disclose the poetic and aesthetic achievement of the language learner, as well as the ethical backdrop against which such expression occurs. Finally, drawing on Claudia Ruitenberg’s reading of Derrida’s ethic of hospitality of education, I claim that error can appear in classroom discourse as a type of unexpected, uninvited “guest”, which can unsettle and disturb, but also expand and enrich, the language and culture of the host.