The Ear-Eye Connection

Reid says error isn't "the overriding consideration for the teacher or the student," but there's little else that distinguishes the writing of ear and eye learners. She also says it's "essential to approach each student as an individual, and to identify students' needs," but doesn't all research, by its nature, essentialize, generalize, and stereotype?

The writing errors of ear learners aren't really errors. Mishearing why for while, or making subject-verb agreement errors in writing "This student needs to get their act together," are based on communicative usage, on the evolving nature of the language. A codified system of rules for language use demarcates those with education and those without, but language use is more important in determining meaning and correctness. If everyone makes the same mistake, it's no longer a mistake. When Dante wrote the Divine Comedy, he wrote it in a vulgar (read: vernacular) form of Latin that was spoken as a dialect by the working class - we now call that dialect Italian. The same is true for English as far as I know, it's largely German vocabulary spoken with a French accent.

At some point, the changes of usage in English, from the British, American, or otherwise, will constitute a new language based on how we use it and not on the rule systems we attribute. We're not at that point, yet, though, so we still mark errors.