How Tanzania secondary school teachers react to students' interlanguage: focus on the treatment of errors in written work

This study observes the extent to which secondary school teachers treat learners’ language. Particularly the treatment of errors committed by learners of the English language as a second language in the Ordinary levels (secondary schools) in Tanzania. The teaching and learning of a language whether L, or L2 is aimed at providing the learners with the information which will enable them to use the language correctly. In order to understand the stage the learners have reached the teachers give work to the learners to do. From this work the teachers are able to discover the problems (for instance, errors) which the learners still face. It is these problems (errors) that this stud, tries to discover and how teachers react to them. In order to seek specific information from both the teachers and the students unstructured questionnaires and observation were used. The study focused on spelling errors and the most common spelling errors were errors of omission, errors of addition, and substitution spelling errors; also special type errors were identified. It also focused on grammatical errors (subject-verb Agreement errors, tense errors, and prepositional errors).From the findings it was also found that teachers failed to identify most of the errors committed by the learners. In other instances the learners provided correct tenses but teachers corrected them by providing the incorrect tenses instead. The implication is that it is not only the learners who make errors but also the teachers commit errors of one kind or the other. This affects the learners in the course of learning the L2.