1. Common fossilised errors
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2. “i’m going to brazil ”
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3. “How do you spell pie?” “P – E – I”
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4. “He works in an office “He works in an office Created by James Taylor

5. “They is very angry with James and Anna”
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6. “I have 20 years”
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7. “Can you borrow me a pencil?”
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8. “It was so excited!”
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9. ”I feeled sick.” “I felled in love.”
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10. “Look at this dresses.” Created by James Taylor

11. "The most places have problems."
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12. “He married your best friend.”
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13. “He work very hard.”
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14. “You are new here?”
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15. “I am a lawyer for 10 years.”
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16. “He work-ed there all night.”
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17. “Are you coming?” “It depends of the weather.”
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18. “There’s lot of researches on this.”
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19. “When I was young, I usually would play football every day.”
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20. “I've seen La La Land but I didn't like because it's boring."
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21. "I have a doubt."
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22. “What?”
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23. “It’s three and thirty”
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24. Created by James Taylor

25. Answer key Capital letters Confusing ‘your’ with “his” or “her”
Confusing ‘e’ with ‘i’
Third person –s
Confusing he and she
Question formation
Subject verb agreement
Overuse of the present simple, not using present perfect
Using have not be to say age
Pronunciation of –ed endings
Confusing borrow and lend
Dependent prepositions
Switching –ed and –ing adjective endings
Uncountable nouns
Mistakes with the past forms of feel and fall
Confusing ‘usually’ and ‘used to’
Missing object
Writing this instead of these
Confusing ‘doubt’ with ‘question’
Adding an unnecessary article
Not using ‘pardon’ or ‘excuse me’
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26. Teachers’ notes
Show students pictures on slides 2 to 23. Tell them these are typical mistakes that upper intermediate and above students make. Ask them to try and identify the errors. You can go through them as a class or ask them to work together in pairs and make a list. The answers are on slide 25.
Show sts picture on slide 24. Tell them that they are going to read a story about this family. Can they predict what it will be about?
(The following activity is adapted from Mess it Up, an activity in 52 by Lindsay Clandfield and Luke Meddings.)
Put students in groups of 5, give them the following text divided into 75 words chunks and ask them to read their section. They should not show it to the other members of their group: R0elfGubhmNuc0/edit?usp=sharing.
Ask them to share what they've learnt from their paragraph. Together they should be able to piece it together. Make sure that they summarise the text and do not read from it, or show it to each other.
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27. Teachers’ notes
Check the story together as a class. By the way, I chose this story as it is an opportunity to teach the students some critical thinking and analytical skills, so try to embrace that.
Ask them to rewrite the text on piece of paper but ask them to add mistakes into it. Ask them to imagine the kind of mistakes they might have made themselves and include them. Ask them to - mix up verb forms, change some spellings, swap words around etc.
Ask students to swap texts around, and correct what they think is wrong. They can then check with the student who made the changes and see if they were right and what they missed.
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