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Phrase: Slip of the tongue
When speaking your mother tongue, you make mistakes.
It’s one type of error called a slip of the tongue.
Another mistake with the same name is when you unintentionally speak your mind.
A slip of the tongue occurs when you make a minor error while speaking or unintentionally say something you didn’t want to say.
For example, during a work meeting, you say that an idea someone has put forward is the worst one you’ve ever heard.
That type of comment is hurtful and, frankly, unprofessional.
It’s also hard to explain away as a slip of the tongue even when it was unintentional and occurred because you spoke without thinking.
It happens sometimes. C’est la vie!
All you can do is say you’re sorry and hope it doesn’t affect your professional life.
In the English language learning classroom, though, as students’ knowledge improves, it challenges the teacher.
Especially in classes like mine, where 100% error correction is offered, the difficulty now lies in knowing when a student’s error is a mistake or, more simply, just a slip of the tongue.
One of the easiest ways to determine this is that the student self-corrects.
You see, when a native speaker makes a grammar or word choice mistake, they often immediately self-correct.
When students do this, you know it was not an error but merely a slip of the tongue.
I always try to highlight these slips of the tongue as positives in the learning process because it is a small sign the student is speaking the second language more naturally.
I guess we could say a slip of the tongue in the language classroom involving a simple mistake is like an unforced error in baseball.
It’s naturally the student’s fault.
Flesch-Kincaid Readability Test
This post is understandable by someone with at least an 8th-grade education (age 13 – 14).
On the Flesch-Kincaid reading-ease test, this post scores 69.
The easier a passage is to read, the higher the score on a scale of 0 – 100.