Error correction

At school, I wasn’t very keen on English. 

Of course, as everyone else, I attended the lessons, did my homework, learnt the words by heart and kept a notebook with word | transcription | translation. 

But English lessons never were my cup of tea. 

There were many reasons for that, but among them there was one very unpleasant thing. 

It was quite a challenging task for me, as it was easier to retell the text with my own words (and I think that would show my speaking skills better), but that wasn’t the task.  

During this ‘reproduction’ the teacher would listen to students, follow the text and correct every mistake a student made. 

You probably understand how frustrating it was, because at that time my brain was focused on how not to forget the words, and I automatically repeated after the teacher, but if someone had asked me to voice my mistakes after the text again, I wouldn’t have remembered a thing. 

Do you think it was an efficient way to correct mistakes? Well, not really. 

It would’ve been much better if the teacher had heard the whole text out, noted down my mistakes and then used different techniques to correct them. 

That would allow me to focus on the mistakes I made (I’m still judging the task by the way, but that way of correction at least would’ve been logical), and who knows, maybe I could’ve corrected the mistakes myself, which in turn would help me remember them and avoid them in the future.

We all learn better by making mistakes, but when it comes to language learning, we also need to reflect on our mistakes to avoid making them in the future. 

To get a better understanding of  how to deal with mistakes, let’s take a look at what kind of mistakes students usually make in class. 

I will refer to some, especially in spoken English.

These are the most frequent, but of course, there are more. 

When it comes to higher levels, you can also work with rhythm and intonation. 

For example, tag questions have different intonations depending on whether you want to confirm the information or request it.

Do you think there’s a point in correcting elementary level students’  wrong usage of present perfect if they haven’t learnt it yet? 

Is it a good idea to pay attention to the wrong use of articles if you teach Present Continuous?  

Will you spend time drilling the correct pronunciation of a word that is not your target language for the lesson? 

If your answer to these 3 questions is ‘No’, then you’re on the right track. 

Keep in mind that we can’t teach everything in one lesson and the best thing a teacher can do with error correction is be consistent with the context of the lesson, its aims and the target language.

In ‘Learning Teaching’ Scrivener suggests to think about 5 decisions teachers need to make when working with oral errors:

I strongly recommend reading the source if you want to dive deeper into error correction. 

I find these questions very useful and logical, so let’s discuss them further. 

The first two questions are already answered above, so let’s move to question 3, as it’s a very interesting one.

And here it’s time to talk about accuracy vs fluency, because they do play an important role in making this decision. 

Remember the situation I started this blog post with? 

The teacher clearly wanted my language to become more accurate. 

But did she help me with that? I really doubt it. 

If we’re aiming for efficient error correction, we must think about the aims of activities.

SITUATION 1

Let’s say, your students do a pre-text discussion and the aim of that is to provide them with the context of the text and brainstorm some ideas. 

What do you think we practise here – accuracy or fluency? 

If we practise fluency, do you think it’s a good idea to interrupt your students’ discussion with immediate error correction as soon as they make a mistake? Probably not. 

Sometimes I don’t even do anything with those mistakes at the lesson, they just give me general understanding of what my students need to work on, and I use them later in work.

SITUATION 2

Suppose, you have a different situation. 

It’s a controlled practice stage and you check the first grammar exercise with your students. 

One of the students reads a sentence with a mistake. 

Would you write it down and wait till the end of activity or would you immediately correct your student? 

If you correct the mistake instantly, it might help bridge that gap the student has as it focuses on accuracy and it makes the rest of practice tasks easier for the student.

SITUATION 3

One more situation. It’s a freer practice stage, students work in groups on the task that aims to apply the target language to a speaking activity. 

It seems that accuracy is important here, it’s target language practice. 

But it’s a speaking task, so fluency is practised here as well. 

That’s why it is important to know exactly what your students practice at every stage of the lesson. 

That will make you fully equipped and prepared to decide what kind of error correction to do.

Here I will refer to questions 4 and 5 from the previous paragraph.

When we hear ‘error correction’, we usually picture that one option when a teacher corrects a student directly. 

You might be surprised, but there are way more options in fact. 

It’s also a good idea to refer your students to course books where they can find vocabulary/grammar they made a mistake in, ask them to read that one more time and then elicit the correct answer. 

Students might even do self-correction. 

But in any case, it’s important to indicate that this error happened.

Below I will share some options on how I usually do that.

1) The method I use most frequently for delayed error correction is ‘collect’ my students’ mistakes in a notepad and then share it with them at the end of an activity (feedback on language). 

I only ask ‘What do you think is wrong with this sentence?’ or ‘What do you think is missing here?’ or ‘What do you think I should change in the sentence?’. 

Then I correct the mistake so that it’s visible for my students.

2) I use the same method working with pronunciation. 

If there’s a word (or words) my students commonly mispronounce, I would write it down and at the end of activity I usually show it to my students and ask them to read it.

For example, students make a mistake in the word ‘hotel’ placing the stress on the first syllable. 

I show them the word, ask to read it and if they make a mistake again, I pull a slightly suspicious facial expression and ask “Where is the stress here? Is it ‘o’ or ‘e’?” 

At this point they remember that the stress should go on the second syllable and read the word correctly. 

Then we drill the word.

3) By the way, facial expressions and body language are also of good service in error correction, especially the instant one.

You can use your hands to indicate the correct intonation (up or down). 

I also use a gesture when I point behind my back to show past tense. 

Prepositions of place also go very well with gestures.

4) Another way of using body language for error correction is using fingers on your hands. 

For example, you teach ‘to be’ in present tense, and the word order in questions is different from the word order in affirmative sentences. 

I usually assign one word for one finger and when a student makes a mistake in word order, I show how to change places of words. 

For example: 

5) You can use your intonation to indicate something is wrong in the sentence. 

For example, beginner and elementary level students often confuse possessive adjectives, and I use surprised intonation to indicate there’s something wrong.

For example:

6) One more obvious way is to ask questions. 

I usually use this to correct tenses. 

For example, I asked my students at the lesson on Monday ‘What did you do at the weekend?’. 

Here’s an example of a conversation:

This is obviously not the complete list of the ways you can use to gently correct your students’ mistakes. 

I strongly recommend reading the chapter on error correction in Jim Scrivener’s ‘Learning Teaching’ (p. 285 ‘Errors and correction). 

You can find way more techniques there, try them out and choose your favourites.