ERROR CORRECTION
Correction is a way of reminding students of the forms of Standard
English. It shouldn´t be a kind of criticism or punishment.
You have to think of Correction as a way of giving information or
feed-back to your students, just when it will support their learning.
Correction shouldn´t mean insisting on everything being absolutely
correct. Correction means helping students to become more
accurate in their use of language. It means helping people “express”
themselves more accurately.
“Correction should be a part of learning where every bit of language
shows itself, announces itself and thus leads to learning, but not a
business of showing errors.”
There are some things you have to keep in mind when correcting:
- Consider the Context in which student language use and
errors occur.
Students in the early stages of cognitive development and
language acquisition need to be encouraged to produce
language that communicates “meaning; Error correction
techniques that require student reflection on language
structures or vocabulary are not appropriate for learners in
those early stages, but with advanced learners, the opposite is
usually the case.
The teacher decides to correct only certain errors. Which
errors will be corrected is usually decided by the objectives of
the lesson or the specific exercise that is being done at that
moment (some errors are ignored)
- You have to Focus on the Learner.
It is important to give our students time to realize that they
have made a mistake and try to correct it themselves, to let the
learner “self-correct”. If they can´t, someone else can help
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them (another student). If nobody can help them, then the
teacher can step in and give the correct answer.
You have to let your students make mistakes, they need to,
because we all learn best through making mistakes.
- You should Practice a Variety of Feed-back Techniques.
Individual learners may differ in terms of the particular error
correction technique most appropriate for their unique
language development needs.
Choosing to learn and use a few different types of feed-back
that seem to produce student-generated repairs increases
your chance of reaching more students.
- Aims of the Task.
Before you begin an activity, you have to bear in mind whether
you are concentrating on accuracy or fluency. Be clear of the
aims of the task and make sure students are aware of what
you expect from them. Don´t present an activity as a fluency
task and then pick them up on every single mistake.
Correction is not only a job of the teacher. In Traditional approaches
it used to be, but not nowadays. It can be realized by:
1. The Teacher.
He is the responsible of correction, the one who knows the
solution. He should ask questions to help students chance
upon the correction necessary to the errors. The teacher
should play the role of a synthesizer, organizer and supervisor
(he should only very occasionally come to take direct role in
the discussion)
2. Student - to - Student .
Students can also correct one another. Peer Correction often
helps to create a positive class atmosphere as students realize
that the teacher is not the only source of error correction and
they can learn a lot from one another.
The teacher is only guiding and assisting them when
necessary, but constantly overlooking their work.
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3. Self – Correction.
The ability to correct themselves when they make a mistake is
very important for students to develop. Teacher should give
them time to correct themselves; it is much better if they get
into the habit of listening to themselves when they are
speaking and correct themselves as they go along.
Sometimes just by raising the eyebrows the teacher, or
repeating the mistake, students will know what he means and
back track to correct the error themselves.
TYPES Of CORRECTIVE FEED-BACK
- Explicit Correction.
The teacher provides the correct form.
- Recast.
The teacher implicitly reformulates the students error or
provides the correction.
- Clarification Request.
Using phrases like “Excuse me?” or “I don´t understand” , the
teacher indicates that the message has not been understood
or that the students´ utterance contained some kind of
mistakes and that a repetition or a reformulation is required.
- Metalinguistic Clues.
The teacher poses questions or provides comments or
information related to the information of the students´
utterance, without providing the correct form.
- Elicitation.
The teacher directly elicits the correct form from the student by
asking questions, by pausing to allow the student to complete
the teacher´s utterance or by asking students to reformulate
the utterance. Eliciting questions differs from questions that
are defined as metalinguistic clues in which they require more
than a yes/no response.
- Repetition.
The teacher repeats the student´s error and adjust intonation
to draw student´s attention to it.
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Other Correction Techniques could be:
- Rehashing.
The teacher writes learners´ errors on the whiteboard, then
ask learners to rehash or summarize the communication using
the errors on the board as prompts. This activity helps learners
to reinforce corrected language (vocabulary, grammar,
pronunciation)
- The Correction Sandwich.
This is a correction slot done in the middle of a communication
activity. The teacher can stop a discussion activity, conduct a
correction slot and then allow students to continue the
discussion.
- Grammar Gap Fill.´
The teacher writes up some incorrect sentences he hears in
the speaking activity and deletes a word or words from each
one. Students have to fill the gaps. (ex: working prepositions)
- Vocabulary Extension.
Teacher writes some headings on the board relating to lexical
areas from communication activity. Learners make lists under
each heading of words and expressions they used and hear
used during the activity. Then the teacher asks students to add
three items to each list, using a dictionary or the teacher as a
resource.
- Getting learners more involved in Correcting each other.
Feedback can be done firstly in small groups, where the
student gives feedback to the peer he has been listening to,
and then, as a whole class to deal with unresolved difficulties.
- Zero Correction.
Sometimes students won´t benefit from any feedback on
spoken errors, so instead of having a correction slot, the
teacher simply uses the errors he has noted down as the basis
for language work in future classes.
- Body language or Facial expression.
Raising an eyebrow, or tilting your head to one side or giving a
slight frown.
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- How many mistakes.
Good for controlled speaking practice. (ex: “ Most is right, but
you made two mistakes”, “ One word is in the wrong position in
the sentence”)
- Grammatical Terminology.
Using grammatical terminology to identify the mistake. (ex:
“wrong tense” or “you need an adverb, not an adjective”)
- Rules.
Teacher gives the rule (ex: “since” usually takes the Present
Perfect.
This works best if they already know the rule.
- Tests.
Sometimes it is a good idea to have little tests based on the
classic mistake students made in class. It encourages them to
look over their notes and try to learn from them.
One way to focus on students´ mistakes is to take “time out” of
an activity and look at mistakes as a group.
When students are doing a speaking task in pairs or groups,
the teacher can listen what they are saying (students will get
used to see him hovering around them).
Then, he makes a note of the mistakes he hears; whether they
are pronunciation, grammatical, lexical..
He collects a
selection of their errors and then stops the activity. He writes a
selection of the mistakes on the board and ask students to
correct them.
They can have a notebook and pen and make notes of
mistakes they hear. If they do their job well, they could even
run the correction slot with their mistakes instead of the
teacher. Usually most of the mistakes can be corrected by the
students themselves.
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So, to summarize, mistakes are good things and students
need to know that they are, because you learn from your
mistakes. If you don´t allow students to make mistakes, you
will take away from the natural learning process required to
achieve competency and, eventually, fluency.
It is very important to remind students that if they are always
making new mistakes it is okay. New mistakes are usually a
sign that they are exploring new uses of language or
experimenting with new vocabulary, but if they are always
repeating the same mistakes it is not a good sign.
There is little point correcting learners if they don´t have a
fairly immediate opportunity to redo whatever they were
doing and get it right. They need the opportunity for a proper
rerun of the communication scenario in which they made the
error.
Accurate but minimal contributions in speaking activities are
unlikely to benefit learning as much as inaccurate but
extended participation.
The danger of over-correcting is that students will lose
motivation and you may destroy the flow of the class or the
activity by butting in and correcting every single mistake
Teachers spend too much time focusing on what students do
wrong at the expense of helping them to get things right.
In speaking English, the emphasis of the teacher should be to
discover what learners didn´t say and help them say that,
rather than to pick the bones out of what they did say.
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