All learners make mistakes. This is not confined to
language learners. We all make mistakes when we are
speaking our mother tongue. Whether we bother to
correct ourselves or not seems to depend on whether
we think our hearers have noticed, and how urgently we
want to get on with what we are saying. We know how
to correct them; we can recognize our own mistakes for
what they are. This is not usually the case with mistakes
made by a learner. Not only does he not always
recognize his mistakes, but when his attention is drawn
to them, he often cannot correct them; he may even
commit another error in trying to do so. Furthermore, the
majority of learners' errors are linguistically quite
different from those made by a native speaker. We
judge a foreigner's knowledge of our language by the
number and sort of mistakes he makes. We are inclined
to think that he knows our language quite well if he does
not make many mistakes. It does not usually occur to us
that he may be avoiding taking risks and confining
himself to doing only what he knows he can do right.
Non-specialist people assess a foreigner's ability in their
language in the first place by how haltingly he speaks
and by how good his pronunciation is, that is in linguistic
terms, but in its most superficial aspect. Contrary to
language professionals, they tend to assume that one
can equate a poorer pronunciation with a general lack of
knowledge of the language, and that a halting speech is
confined to those who do not know the language well.
According to the passage, the author's view
regarding foreign language speaker's not making
many mistakes ----.
