An article discussing the role of correction in English language teaching.
A lot of time and effort is spent on training courses and beyond encouraging teachers to consider whether immediate or later correction of student errors during oral work is appropriate. There are variety of good methods and techniques suggested for correcting students’ errors on the spot.
Our aim here is to consider what benefits correction of any kind might have for learners, as well as to present some ideas for conducting later correction. We have included a sample lesson plan with two of these ideas incorporated into it.
Why correct learners? Look at this statements about correction of students’ oral work. What do you think?
Advanced students need loads of correction, beginners hardly any. When you start to learn a language you need to be able to communicate imperfectly in lots of situation, not perfectly in a few. The teacher’s job is to support learners as they blunder through a range of communicative scenarios, not badger them because they forget the third person -s. With advanced learners the opposite is usually the case.
The jury is out on the question of whether correcting students, however you do it, has any positive effect on their learning. There is some evidence, though, that time spent on correcting learners may be wasted.
Research into Second Language Acquisition has suggested that it may be that some language forms can be acquired more quickly through being given special attention while others may be acquired in the learners’ own time, regardless of teacher attention. This helps explain, for example, why intermediate learners usually omit third person-s just like beginners, but often form questions with do correctly, unlike beginners.
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. Learners need the opportunity for a proper rerun of the communication scenario in which they made the error, if they are to have any chance of integrating the correct form into their English. Whether the error was teacher-corrected, peer-corrected or self-corrected in the first place is of relatively minor importance .
Lot of learners and teachers think correction is important. Is this because it helps them to learn and teach or helps them to feel like learners and teachers? Accurate but minimal contributions in speaking activities are unlikely to benefit learning as much as inaccurate but extended participation. Learners can be hampered by their own inhibitions and attitudes to accuracy and errors, the teacher’s attitude and behaviour (conscious or unconscious) to accuracy and errors or the restricted nature of the activities proposed by the teacher.
Teachers spend too much time focusing on what students do wrong at the expense of helping them to get things right.
When giving feedback to learners on their performance in speaking English, the emphasis for the teacher should be to discover what learners didn’t say and help them say that, rather than pick the bones out of what they did say. This requires the use of activities which stretch learners appropriately and the teacher listening to what learners aren’t saying. That’s difficult.
By: DULCE GARCIA |T-I| MARIVELES NATIONAL HIGH SCHOOL – CABCABEN Cabcaben Mariveles, Bataan
