Unit 3 The Teaching and Learning of ESOL

Module 5 Errors and Error Correction

At the end of this module you will:-

a) recognise errors

b) have some understanding of why students make them

c) be able to prepare useful remedial exercises

Unit 3 1 Module 5
Introduction: Psycholinguistics

Psycholinguistics is the study of language acquisition. This is an

interdisciplinary field as it brings together the theories of psychology and
linguistics. Linguists study the structure of language, ie sounds and
meanings, and the grammar to which they relate, and they come together
with psychologists who investigate how people acquire the structures and
functions, understand them and use them in speech. The work can be used
to inform TEFL but also to help people with speech and language difficulties
where some important component of communication may not have been
acquired.

A knowledge of the difficulties of learning a foreign language is built into some

degree courses in ESOL and Applied Linguistics. Their syllabuses include
learning a foreign language from scratch in order to study the process by
which we are taught and by which we learn (psycholinguistic study).

If you have ever learned a foreign language, draw on your own experiences
when you are teaching. How did you learn? How did you not learn? (look
back at Unit 3 Module 3 for one person’s discussion of this issue.)

As you reflect on your experience, consider the language errors that you
made and think about the possible causes of those errors. Such knowledge of
the difficulties in learning a foreign language should lead you, as a teacher of
ESOL, to develop a helpful attitude towards your students.

Your students need to be confident enough, and 'uninterrupted' enough to be

fluent, while at the same time they need to know that they will be corrected
and not allowed to continue making the same mistakes. Fluency and
accuracy are the aims, whereas effective communication – the ultimate
goal – can be achieved by a blend of the two.

The relationship between their first language and English will affect students'
learning in both negative and positive ways. Your attitude to learning foreign
languages will also affect your students negatively or positively. Think of all
the elements we have talked about that go together to produce a successful
language learner. Learning English is a difficult process!

Unit 3 2 Module 5
SELF-CHECK 3:5 1

Look at statements by these learners. Imagine the student makes the same type of error
over and over again.

Spot the error and then make a brief note on how the structure of their own language
might be affecting what they say in English.

EXAMPLE:
Every day I am eating breakfast at 6am.
The student has put present continuous for a regular action.

The tense used in the student's own language for regular habits might look like the present
continuous - it might have a ‘to be‘ verb in it.

Statement 1

I believe that capital punishment is wrong, this is because the person is not always guilty,
there are many people in prison, who have committed a crime.

Statement 2

when he had Caught the fish, He thRew it into the buckeT.

Statement 3

I had some a rice with fish and the vegetable for dinner.

Statement 4

I had a genial time in England. I went for some promenades and was very content.

Unit 3 3 Module 5
COMMENT 3:5 1

These are all common types of errors by certain language speakers:

Statement 1:
Portuguese speakers and a number of other language speakers will string
clauses together with commas or ‘and’ in writing. Sentence length is different
in their languages, and often one sentence continues for one paragraph. And
paragraphs are problematic too.

Statement 2:
Arabic, Hebrew, Japanese and some other languages have no capital letters
and this can cause problems for beginners trying to work out where they are
needed or just mistaking the forms one for the other- buckeT.

Statement 3:
Chinese and Japanese do not use articles or plurals, so sorting out this
system can be difficult.

Statement 4:
Speakers of Romance languages - in this case French - will come across
many ‘false friends’ and assume that the meaning is the same.

The amount and severity of these problems is reduced as the learners

become more familiar with English, but the sooner you can discuss them and
watch out for them the better.

Attitudes towards error

People from different walks of life have different attitudes towards error.

a) You can react as a psycholinguist, ie "This is interesting, maybe we should

not call this an error, but a stage in the learning process."

b) You can react as a formal teacher, ie "Oh no, what will he achieve in his
exam?"

c) You can react as a member of the public, ie "This English is very poor",
"This person is illiterate", "What do they teach in schools these days?"

d) You can react as a child and not care at all!

(Many members of the public just assume that foreigners are not so intelligent
because they do not speak THE language, ie our language, English. We have

Unit 3 4 Module 5
indeed been somewhat spoiled by others needing to learn English as the
language of commerce and the number of people in Britain and the US who
are fluent in a language other than English is rather embarrassingly low.)

The best way to react is probably as a teacher-researcher: It is very important

that you correct your students’ errors, but if this is done mechanically and
without at least wondering how and why the error came about and what you
can do about it, then you are wasting your time and theirs. Think about
language and languages and find out more about these topics as you develop
as a teacher (see Unit 4 Module 2 for more on this).

Error analysis

In its advanced form, error analysis is quite a scientifically developed area of

research involving collecting and classifying errors, and suggesting possible
causes.

We, as teachers of ESOL, do not usually need to formally analyse errors in

this way. However, small scale surveys may help us to see patterns such as
the ones mentioned above which, ultimately, will help us to help our students.
Such surveys may save your time in the long run by allowing you to predict
the most likely areas of difficulty for a parallel or future class and to plan more
effective lessons.

A study of students' errors shows the students' current problems and helps us
to plan something called remedial work. This may be carried out informally,
based on written tasks. For example, many of your students are confusing
simple past and past perfect tenses - you notice this in their homework and
devise an exercise which will hopefully help to eliminate the problem.

More formal collection of data may reveal that only a small section of your
class is actually making this mistake. In this case, work with that group
separately, or write them a homework exercise so as not to bore the rest of
the class. There is more about remedial work on pages 9 and the following.

Apart from revealing language areas which require extra practice, error
analysis may also reveal teaching techniques which are not working as well
as they might for this group of learners, or an order of presentation which may
need adjustment. Perhaps students are missing what you tell them orally or
perhaps they are not good at copying diagrams from the board, resulting in
poor individual work based on wrong data.

Some theorists name the collection of data for analysis Performance Analysis
rather than 'Error Analysis'. The term 'Performance Analysis' refers to the

Unit 3 5 Module 5
collection of errors and of examples of correct usage. It is quite time
consuming and we do not recommend it in great detail at this stage, though it
is something to look into later. You could do this sort of thing with a one-to-
one student. It is worth reading up on how it is done first.

Interpretation of errors

For our purposes, we only need look at the work of our students, note
common errors and begin to look at:

a) by whom they are being made

b) why they are being made

c) what remedial work we can prepare

d) how we can help future students to avoid these errors.

This is, in fact, often referred to as 'interpretation of error', not analysis; again
another linguistic argument could develop here!

In Unit 3 Module 3 we mentioned 3 types of errors:

Cultural
Phonological
Grammatical/vocabulary

In this module we will be focusing mainly on the second and third types as
well as several other types of language errors.

Ways of marking written errors

a) Classifying errors with a code

Mark the errors using the following code. This classification is simple yet
comprehensive and can be understood by the students:

G grammar
SP spelling
WO word order*

Unit 3 6 Module 5
P punctuation
V vocabulary
PR prepositions
T wrong verb tense*
^ missing word
{} something not necessary
?M the meaning is unclear
F too formal/informal

Underline the error and write the appropriate abbreviation in the margin. It is
useful to get students into the habit of writing on alternate lines - it is often
easier to read their script this way, and it is easier to mark.

* Note: even though tenses and word order are elements of grammar, special labels
have been devised for them because such types of error are frequent and it is
helpful to separate them from the rest of grammatical errors.

SELF-CHECK 3:5 2

Using the code, correct the following paragraph by underlining each error and writing the
code on the left hand side of this piece. The first is given. There are about 15, depending
on how you count and there are errors of all the types above.

sp Last year I went on a ski trip to Swizerland and

we stayed in hotel in the edge of small village
called Verbier. It was really cold when we get there below 0
degrees the trees were nearly frozen and we all had to wear
really warm cloths. We got there at 2:00 on the morning so we
were happy when we got into bed.
It have started off really exciting trip… We where on the
third day for our afternoon run and we had came down the slope
for the last time. I felt so confiding about what I was doing and
that I could do nothing wrong but then our group stopped. We
were almost at the bottom of the slop when we came to an icy
locale…(cont)

Unit 3 7 Module 5
b) Selective marking

Look at this small extract from a student's writing (which may be a bit of an
exaggeration as errors are not often packed so densely in students' work).

My brother he very tall and with gold hairs. He like for esports and rok musik.
On weekendes to the sinema he often going there is on movies what he like.

What a mess there would be on the page if you decided to correct all these
errors! Splatting red pen all over a piece of work can be both confusing and
discouraging.

Firsst of all, ask yourself:

Does the passage communicate? Yes. The errors, though many, do not
impede the intended message. You can praise the student for communicating
the point.
Then ask yourself: Why are the errors occurring? How can we eliminate
them? Answering these questions will allow you to approach errors in a more
educated way and, rather than simply correct, think how you would prevent
the students from repeating the same or similar errors.

Having answered these questions, you may choose to do selective marking.

Selective marking means focusing on one or several things to mark in a piece

of work. These need to be announced before a piece of work is handed in,
through discussion with the students so they are clear about what will
happen.

For example:
Tell the students that in their next piece of work you will be looking specifically
at past tense forms and how well they can use them.
OR
They have to include the key vocabulary you have learnt in a paragraph
and get points for doing so.
OR
You could have a focus on politeness and use of formal language with credit
given for having the right tone.

Teachers often set up tasks like this and then when they get the work, cover it
in red pen for all sorts of errors that have nothing to do with the task - this is
not a good way to help the students.

When you mark the work that has a target, mark in a coloured pen and a
pencil. Use the pen to mark all the good instances of use in the piece and the
errors with the key forms.

Unit 3 8 Module 5
Mark all other mistakes only lightly in pencil to show that these are not the
ones that are being concentrated on. Make a comment about how well the
target was reached. (Some teachers prefer not to mark other errors even
lightly in pencil - you may have to be guided by your class on this issue. For
example, many students will take issue with a teacher who does not point out
their mistakes, even if these mistakes are not relevant to the lesson).

In this situation and indeed on every piece of work always tick or comment
on good work. You are there to see what the student has done well, as well
as what they have made mistakes with.

SELF-CHECK 3:5 3

Here is another section from the ski trip story: This time mark the piece three times using
three different colours.
1st time: Mark only for spelling and comment on it.
2nd time: Mark only for verb forms.
3rd time: Mark positively for elements of a good story.

It looked dangerous with small ice ships roling losely in the wind and the frezing ice
glitering in the sun. People shouted:
“What are you doing up there?”
“Come on!”
Feeling confident and brave but still with a look of fear on my face, I cleared my mind of
everything, and pushed off with my sticks.

At first I feeled as if I was OK but then I started to go out of control. My sticks flied from my
hands. I could hear my skis scrapping on the ice. Then the scrapping stoped and I feeled
myself hurled into the air. For about what seemed like an age I saw a blur of little woden
huts and other people skiing as I flied through the air…

COMMENT

You should have spotted that this is a good descriptive piece of writing.
There are patterns in the spelling errors and in the errors with the past simple
irregular forms, which are not random. So you should be able to praise this
student for a good piece of writing and give very clear advice as to what to
practise for next time.

c) Indentifying patterns of errors and preparing remedial exercises

The above example demonstrates that it is useful to look for patterns of

errors in your students’ work. For example, all errors with the past tense can

Unit 3 9 Module 5
be underlined and marked with a 1 in the margin. Spelling errors involving
homophones (their/there) could be marked with a 2 and so on, up to no more
than 4 points. At the end of the students’ work you can discuss the error and
choose an exercise to correct it.

Once a pattern has been identified, inform the student of the specific areas
he/she needs to work on. Review the relevant rule together. Once that has
been done, give the student a remedial exercise to establish that the
language point has been understood and the error pattern is no longer
repeated.

The aim of a remedial exercise is to focus the students’ attention on a single

point of error in order to help them with understanding how it works. Remedial
means fixing or making better and remedial exercises come after the students
have made the error with the aim of fixing it.

SELF-CHECK 3:5 4

Sometimes you have to look carefully to identify a pattern of error.

In the following passage, a 14-year-old in an international school is writing about a project

to do with developing a robot. But there is something very specific wrong with this piece of
writing. Can you spot it?

We had a lot of problems to overcome like the movement of the robot, it was
too slow and we increased the speed. The things he does well - he is good at
socializing and makes a decent conversation.

The robot still has no strength to pick up grocery bags, we need to make him
a bit stronger. We need to add a dictionary and encyclopedia to the robot,
people can ask him questions and he tells them the answer. We also found
out the robot cannot keep messages from the phone, the memory has been
expanded.

COMMENT

This student at first seems to be a good writer as there are no spelling or

word formation problems. But she cannot express cause and effect with
conjunctions, such as 'because', 'as', 'so' or 'therefore'. There are no
connectives between clauses. Look again; it is a little tricky to spot, as at first
glance the writing makes sense.

Unit 3 10 Module 5
SELF-CHECK 3:5 5

Put a number 1 in the margin of the above piece of work wherever there is this problem
with cause and effect and write a comment below to bring the student’s attention to the
problem. Tell her what she is doing wrong.

Your comment:

SELF-CHECK 3:5 6

Now prepare a remedial exercise for the student. Your aim is to establish that she
understands how to use of conjunctions of cause and effect. The exercise will contain
instructions (where you tell the student briefly and clearly what she needs to do), a worked
example (where you show how it could be done) and 5 sentences for the student to work
with.

Instructions:
_____________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________

Example:
_____________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________

1. ___________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________

2. ___________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________

3. ___________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________

4. ___________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________

5. ___________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________

COMMENT

There is no single 'correct' exercise to use. It's important that the instructions
should be clear and not long-winded, telling the student exactly what she
needs to do.

Unit 3 11 Module 5
The example should demonstrate how you expect her to complete the task.
The 5 sentences should all be relevant to the language point you focus on.
For instance:

Four of these five sentences have a missing conjunction: either 'because' or 'so'.
One sentence is correct. Rewrite each sentence putting the right conjunction where
it belongs. If nothing needs to be added, write 'correct'.

Example:
He got fired, he kept coming to work late. He got fired because he kept coming to work
late.
We are confident you will pass the exam. correct________

1. We decided to speak Chinese with each other, Li's English was worse than my
Chinese. _______________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________
2. He wrote all night and submitted the paper in the morning, he met the deadline.
__________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________
3. I'm afraid you don't have the authority to give orders here. ____________________
__________________________________________________________________
4. The soldiers died in the battlefield the people could have peace in their land. _____
__________________________________________________________________
5. I can't comment on this design I am colour-blind. ___________________________
__________________________________________________________________

You don't always need to create the exercises yourself from scratch. You can
find them in textbooks and on the internet. However, to prepare an exercise
that will truly help a student or group of students with their specific problem
area, you will usually need to tailor the exercises found elsewhere to the
students' needs, excluding irrelevant examples and zooming in on the
language point in question.

d) Responding to content

Whenever you are doing a realistic writing task that involves the student
following a plan and producing a piece of writing into which they have put
imagination or facts of interest then you must respond as a person as well as
a teacher. These comments do not have to be long and complicated but are
good for student morale.

The ski story ends like this:

At 3 o’clock that afternoon Mr Leboeuf taked me to the Verbier medic centre. I don’t
remember much about hopital but it was clean and tiddy. The doctor sayed I have
sprained the ligaments in my knee and that I have to have a brace on my leg and
CRUTCHES!

Appropriate comments on content would be:

Unit 3 12 Module 5
How long did you have the brace on your leg? And the crutches?
I think you were very brave, but you were going too fast, weren’t you?
A very well written and interesting story.

In this module, we have mainly focused on written correction. The following

passage from Harmer provides some excellent advice for oral correction
during accuracy activities and fluency activities as well as ways to get
students involved in correcting themselves and their classmates.

Now consider the following extract:

Assessing student performance can come from the teacher or from the students themselves.

Teachers assessing students

Assessment of performance can be explicit when we say That was really good, or implicit when, during a
language drill, for example, we pass on to the next student without making any comment or correction (there
is always the danger, however, that the student may misconstrue our silence as something else).
Students are likely to receive teacher assessment in terms of praise or blame. Indeed, one of our roles is
to encourage students by praising them for work that is well done. Praise is a vital component in a student's
motivation and progress. George Petty sees it as an element of a two-part response to student work. He
calls these two parts 'medals' and 'missions'. The medal is what we give students for doing something well,
and the mission is the direction we give them to improve. We should 'try to give every student some
reinforcement every lesson' (2004: 72) and avoid only rewarding conspicuous success. If, he suggests, we
measure every student against what they are capable of doing - and not against the group as a whole - then
we are in a position to give medals for small things, including participation in a task or evidence of thought or
hard work, rather than reserving praise for big achievements only.
While it is true that students respond well to praise, over-complimenting them on their work - particularly
where their own self-evaluation tells them they have not done well - may prove counter-productive. In the
first place, over-praise may create 'praise junkies' (Kohn 2001), that is students who are so addicted to
praise that they become attention seekers and their need for praise blinds them to what progress they are
actually making. Secondly, students learn to discriminate between praise that is properly earned and medals
(in Petty's formulation) that are given out carelessly. This is borne out in research by Caffyn (1984,
discussed in Williams and Burden 1997: 134-136) in which secondary students demonstrated their need to
understand the reasons for the teacher's approval or disapproval. Williams and Burden also point to the
ineffectiveness of blame in the learning process.
What this suggests is that assessment has to be handled with subtlety. Indiscriminate praise or blame will
have little positive effect - indeed it will be negatively received - but a combination of appropriate praise
together with helpful suggestions about how to improve in the future will have a much greater chance of
contributing to student improvement.
It is sometimes tempting to concentrate all our feedback on the language which students use, such as
incorrect verb tenses, pronunciation or spelling, for example, and to ignore the content of what they are
saying or writing. Yet this is a mistake, especially when we involve them in language production activities.
Whenever we ask students to give opinions or write creatively, whenever we set up a role-play or involve
students in putting together a school newspaper or in the writing of a report, it is important to give feedback
on what the students say rather than just on how they say it. Apart from tests and exams, there are a
number of ways in which we can assess our students' work:

 Comments: commenting on student performance happens at various stages both in and outside the
class. Thus we may say Good, or nod approvingly, and these comments (or actions) are a clear sign of
a positive assessment. When we wish to give a negative assessment, we might do so by indicating that

Unit 3 13 Module 5
 something has gone wrong (see below), or by saying things such as That's not quite right. But even
here we should acknowledge the students' efforts first (the medal) before showing that something is
wrong - and then suggesting future action (the mission). When responding to students' written work, the
same praise-recommendation procedure is also appropriate, though here a lot will depend on what
stage the students' writing is at. In other words, our responses to finished pieces of written work will be
different from those we give to help students as they work with written drafts.

 Marks and grades: when students are graded on their work, they are always keen to know what
grades they have achieved. Awarding a mark of 9 out of 10 for a piece of writing or giving a B+
assessment for a speaking activity are clear indicators that students have done well. When students get
good grades, their motivation is often positively affected - provided that the level of challenge for the
task was appropriate. Bad grades can be extremely disheartening. Nor is grading always easy and
clear cut. If we want to give grades, therefore, we need to decide on what basis we are going to do this
and we need to be able to describe this to the students. When we grade a homework exercise (or a test
item) which depends on multiple choice, sentence fill-ins or other controlled exercise types, it will be
relatively easy for students to understand how and why they achieved the marks or grades which we
have given them. But it is more difficult with more creative activities where we ask students to produce
spoken or written language to perform a task. In such cases our awarding of grades will necessarily be
somewhat more subjective. It is possible that despite this our students will have enough confidence in
us to accept our judgement, especially where it coincides with their own assessment of their work. But
where this is not the case - or where they compare their mark or grade with other students and do not
agree with what they find - it will be helpful if we can demonstrate clear criteria for the grading we have
given, either offering some kind of marking scale, or some other written or spoken explanation of the
basis on which we have made our judgement. Awarding letter grades is potentially awkward if people
misunderstand what the letters mean. In some cultures success is only achieved if the grade is X,
whereas for people in other education systems a 'B' indicates a good result. If, therefore, we wish to
rely on grades like this, our students need to be absolutely clear about what such grades mean -
especially if we wish to add plus and minus signs to them (e.g. C++ or A-). Though grades are popular
with students and teachers, some practitioners prefer not to award them because they find the
difference between an A and a B difficult to quantify, or because they can't see the dividing line
between a 'pass' and a 'distinction' clearly. Such teachers prefer to rely on comments to give feedback.
They can give clear responses to the students in this way without running the risk of grading them
erroneously or demotivating them unnecessarily. If we do use marks and grades, however, we can give
them after an oral activity, for a piece of homework or at the end of a period of time (a week or a
semester).

 Reports: at the end of a term or year some teachers write reports on their students' performance,
either for the student, the school or the parents of that student. Such reports should give a clear
indication of how well the student has done in the recent past and a reasonable assessment of their
future prospects. It is important when writing reports to achieve a judicious balance between positive
and negative feedback, where this is possible. As with all feedback, students have a right (and a desire)
to know not only what their weaknesses may be, but also what strengths they have been able to
demonstrate. Reports of this kind may lead to future improvement and progress. The chances for this
are greatly increased if they are taken together with the students' own assessment of their
performance.

Students assessing themselves

Although, as teachers, we are ideally placed to provide accurate assessments of student performance,
students can also be extremely effective at monitoring and judging their own language production. They
frequently have a very clear idea of how well they are doing or have done, and if we help them to develop
this awareness, we may greatly enhance learning.
Student self-assessment is bound up with the whole matter of learner autonomy since if we can
encourage them to reflect upon their own learning through learner training or when on their own away from
any classroom, we are equipping them with a powerful tool for future development.

Unit 3 14 Module 5
 Involving students in assessment of themselves and their peers occurs when we ask a class Do you think
that's right? after writing something we heard someone say up on the board, or asking the class the same
question when one of their number gives a response. We can also ask them at the end of an activity how
well they think they have got on - or tell them to add a written comment to a piece of written work they have
completed, giving their own assessment of that work. We might ask them to give themselves marks or a
grade and then see how this tallies with our own.
Self-assessment can be made more formal in a number of ways. For example, at the end of a coursebook
unit we might ask students to check what they can now do, e.g. 'Now I know how to get my meaning across
in conversation/use the past passive/interrupt politely in conversation', etc.
This kind of self evaluation is at the heart of the 'can do' statements from ALTE (Association of Language
Testers in Europe) and the Common European Framework (CEF). Students - in many different languages -
can measure themselves by saying what they can do in various skill areas. The ALTE statements for general
overall ability (giving six levels from A1-C2), give students clear statements of ability against which to
measure themselves:

Unit 3 15 Module 5
 A final way of formalising an assessment dialogue between teacher and student is through a record of
achievement (ROA). Here, students are asked to write their own assessment of their successes and
difficulties and say how they think they can proceed. The teacher then adds their own assessment of the
students' progress (including grades), and replies to the points the student has made. A typical ROA form
can be seen in Figure 2.

Such ROAs, unlike the more informal journal and letter writing which students and teachers can engage
in, force both parties to think carefully about strengths and weaknesses and can help them decide on
future courses of action. They are especially revealing for other people, such as parents, who might be
interested in a student's progress.
Where students are involved in their own assessment, there is a good chance that their
understanding of the feedback which their teacher gives them will be greatly enhanced as their own
awareness of the learning process increases.

Feedback during oral work

Though feedback - both assessment and correction - can be very helpful during oral work, teachers should
not necessarily deal with all oral production in the same way. Decisions about how to react to performance
will depend upon the stage of the lesson, the activity, the type of mistake made and the particular student
who is making that mistake.

Accuracy and fluency

A distinction is often made between accuracy and fluency. We need to decide whether a particular activity in
the classroom is designed to expect the students' complete accuracy - as in the study of a piece of grammar,
a pronunciation exercise or some vocabulary work, for example - or whether we are asking the students to
use the language as fluently as possible. We need to make a clear difference between 'non-communicative'
and 'communicative' activities; whereas the former are generally intended to ensure correctness, the latter
are designed to improve language fluency.
Most students want and expect us to give them feedback on their performance. For example, in one
celebrated correspondence many years ago, a non-native-speaker teacher was upset when, on a teacher
training course in the UK, her English trainers refused to correct any of her English because they thought it
was inappropriate in a training situation. 'We find that there is practically no correcting at all,' the teacher
wrote, 'and this comes to us as a big disappointment' (Lavezzo and Dunford 1993: 62). Her trainers were not
guilty of neglect, however. There was a principle at stake: 'The immediate and constant correction of all
errors is not necessarily an effective way of helping course participants improve their English’: the trainer
replied on the same page of the journal.

Unit 3 16 Module 5
 This exchange of views exemplifies current attitudes to correction and some of the uncertainties around
it. The received view has been that when students are involved in accuracy work, it is part of the teacher's
function to point out and correct the mistakes the students are making. We might call this 'teacher
intervention' - a stage where the teacher stops the activity to make the correction.
During communicative activities, however, it is generally felt that teachers should not interrupt students in
mid-flow to point out a grammatical, lexical or pronunciation error, since to do so interrupts the
communication and drags an activity back to the study of language form or precise meaning. Traditionally,
according to one view of teaching and learning, speaking activities in the classroom, especially activities at
the extreme communicative end of our continuum, were thought to act as a 'switch' to help learners transfer
'learnt' language to the 'acquired' store (Ellis 1982) or a 'trigger', forcing students to think carefully about how
best to express the meanings they wish to convey (Swain 1985: 249). This view remains at the heart of the
'focus on forms' view of language learning. Part of the value of such activities lies in the various attempts
that students have to make to get their meanings across; processing language for communication is, in this
view, the best way of processing language for acquisition. Teacher intervention in such circumstances can
raise stress levels and stop the acquisition process in its tracks.
If that is the case, the methodologist Tony Lynch argues, then students have a lot to gain from coming up
against communication problems. Provided that they have some of the words and phrases necessary to
help them negotiate a way out of their communicative impasses, they will learn a lot from so doing. When
teachers intervene, not only to correct but also to supply alternative modes of expression to help students,
they remove that need to negotiate meaning, and thus they may deny students a learning opportunity. In
such situations teacher intervention may sometimes be necessary, but it is nevertheless unfortunate - even
when we are using 'gentle correction'. In Tony Lynch's words, 'the best answer to the question of when to
intervene in learner talk is: as late as possible' (Lynch 1997: 34).
Nothing in language teaching is quite that simple, of course. There are times during communicative
activities when teachers may want to offer correction or suggest alternatives because the students'
communication is at risk, or because this might be just the right moment to draw the students' attention to a
problem. Furthermore, when students are asked for their opinions on this matter, they often have conflicting
views. In a survey of all the students at a language school in south London, Philip Harmer found that
whereas 38 per cent of the students liked the teacher to do correction work at the front of the class after the
task had finished, 62 per cent liked being corrected at the moment of speaking (2005:74). It is worth pointing
out, too, that intensive correction can be just as inappropriately handled during accuracy work as during
fluency work. It often depends on how it is done, and, just as importantly, who it is done to. Correction is a
highly personal business and draws, more than many other classroom interactions, on the rapport between
teacher and students. And as Philip Harmer's study suggests, different students have different preferences.
For all these reasons, we need to be extremely sensitive about the way we give feedback and the way we
correct. This means, for example, not reacting to absolutely every mistake that a student makes if this will
demotivate that particular student. It means judging just the right moment to correct, taking into account the
preferences of the group and of individual students. In communicative or fluency activities, it means deciding
if and when to intervene at all, and if we do, what is the best way to do it. Perhaps, too, if we have time, we
should talk to our students about feedback and correction and explain to them what we intend to do, and
when and why, and then invite their own comments so that we can make a bargain with them about this
aspect of classroom experience.

Feedback during accuracy work

As suggested above, correction is usually made up of two distinct stages. In the first, teachers show
students that a mistake has been made, and in the second, if necessary, they help the students to do
something about it. The first set of techniques we need to be aware of, then, is devoted to showing
incorrectness. These techniques are only really beneficial for what we are assuming to be language 'slips'
rather than embedded or systematic errors (due to the interlanguage stage the students have reached).
When we show incorrectness, we are hoping that the students will be able to correct themselves once the
problem has been pointed out. If they can't do this, however, we will need to move on to alternative
techniques.

Unit 3 17 Module 5
  Showing incorrectness: this can be done in a number of different ways:
 Repeating: here we can ask the student to repeat what they have said, perhaps by saying Again?
which, coupled with intonation and expression, will indicate that something isn't clear.
 Echoing: this can be a precise way of pin-pointing an error. We repeat what the student has said,
emphasising the part of the utterance that was wrong, e.g. Flight 309 GO to Paris? (said with a
questioning intonation) or She SAID me? It is an extremely efficient way of showing incorrectness
during accuracy work.
 Statement and question: we can, of course, simply say Good try, but that's not quite right or Do people
think that's correct? to indicate that something hasn't quite worked.
 Expression: when we know our classes well, a simple facial expression or a gesture (for example,
a wobbling hand) may be enough to indicate that something doesn't quite work. This needs to be
done with care as the wrong expression or gesture can, in certain circumstances, appear to be
mocking or cruel.
 Hinting: a quick way of helping students to activate rules they already know (but which they have
temporarily 'mislaid') is to give a quiet hint. We might just say the word tense to make them think that
perhaps they should have used the past simple rather than the present perfect. We could say
countable to make them think about a concord mistake they have made, or tell to indicate they have
chosen the wrong word. This kind of hinting depends upon the students and the teacher sharing
metalanguage (linguistic terms) which, when whispered to students, will help them to correct
themselves.
 Reformulation: a correction technique which is widely used both for accuracy and fluency work is for
the teacher to repeat back a corrected version of what the student has said, reformulating the
sentence, but without making a big issue of it. For example:
STUDENT: She said me I was late.
TEACHER: Oh, so she told you you were late, did she?
STUDENT: Oh yes, I mean she told me. So I was very unhappy and ...

Such reformulation is just a quick reminder of how the language should sound. It does not put the
student under pressure, but clearly points the way to future correctness. Its chief attribute - in contrast to
the other techniques mentioned above - is its unobtrusiveness.
In all the procedures above, teachers hope that students are able to correct themselves once it has
been indicated that something is wrong. However, where students do not know or understand what the
problem is (and so cannot be expected to resolve it), the teacher will want to help the students to get it
right.

 Getting it right: if students are unable to correct themselves or respond to reformulation, we need
to focus on the correct version in more detail. We can say the correct version, emphasising the part
where there is a problem (e.g. Flight 309 GOES to Paris) before saying the sentence normally (e.g.
Flight 309 goes to Paris), or we can say the incorrect part correctly (e.g. Not ‘go’, listen, ‘goes’). If
necessary, we can explain the grammar (e.g. We say I go, you go, we go, but for he, she or it, we say goes.
For example, 'He goes to Paris' or 'Flight 309 goes to Paris'), or the lexical issue, (e.g. We use 'juvenile crime'
when we talk about crime committed by children; a 'childish crime' is an act that is silly because it's like the sort of
thing a child would do). We will then ask the student to repeat the utterance correctly.

We can also ask students to help or correct each other. This works well where there is a genuinely
cooperative atmosphere; the idea of the group helping all of its members is a powerful concept.
Nevertheless, it can go horribly wrong where the error-making individual feels belittled by the process,
thinking that they are the only one who doesn't know the grammar or vocabulary. We need to be
exceptionally sensitive here, only encouraging the technique where it does not undermine such
students. As we have said above, it is worth asking students for their opinions about which techniques
they personally feel comfortable with.

Unit 3 18 Module 5
Feedback during fluency work
The way in which we respond to students when they speak in a fluency activity will have a significant bearing
not only on how well they perform at the time but also on how they behave in fluency activities in the future.
We need to respond to the content, and not just to the language form; we need to be able to untangle
problems which our students have encountered or are encountering, but we may well decide to do this after
the event, not during it. Our tolerance of error in fluency sessions will be much greater than it is during more
controlled sessions. Nevertheless, there are times when we may wish to intervene during fluency activities
(especially in the light of students' preferences - see above), just as there are ways we can respond to our
students once such activities are over.

 Gentle correction: if communication breaks down completely during a fluency activity, we may well
have to intervene. If our students can't think of what to say, we may want to prompt them forwards. If
this is just the right moment to point out a language feature, we may offer a form of correction. Provided
we offer this help with tact and discretion, there is no reason why such interventions should not be
helpful. But however we do it, our correction will be more gentle: in other words, we will not stop the
whole activity and insist on everyone saying the item correctly before being allowed to continue with
their discussion. Gentle correction can be offered in a number of ways. We might simply reformulate
what the student has said in the expectation that they will pick up our reformulation, even though it
hardly interrupts their speech, e.g.

STUDENT 1: And when I go on holiday, I enjoy to ski in the winter and I like to surf in the summer.
TEACHER: Yes, I enjoy skiing, too. STUDENT 1: Ah, yes, I
enjoy skiing.
STUDENT 2: I don't enjoy skiing. It's too cold. What I like is ...
It is even possible that when students are making an attempt to say something they are not sure of,
such reformulation or suggestion may help them to learn something new.
We can use a number of other techniques for showing incorrectness, too, such as echoing and
expression, or even saying I shouldn't say X, say Y, etc. But because we do it gently, and because we do
not move on to a ‘getting it right’ stage, our intervention is less disruptive than a more accuracy-based
procedure would be.
However, we need to be careful of over-correction during a fluency stage. By constantly interrupting
the flow of the activity, we may bring it to a standstill. What we have to judge, therefore, is whether a
quick reformulation or a quick prompt may help the conversation move along without intruding too much
or whether, on the contrary, it is not especially necessary and has the potential to get in the way of the
conversation.

 Recording mistakes: we frequently act as observers, watching and listening to students so that we
can give feedback afterwards. Such observation allows us to give good feedback to our students on
how well they have performed, always remembering that we want to give positive as well as
negative feedback.
One of the problems of giving feedback after the event is that it is easy to forget what students have
said. Most teachers, therefore, write down points they want to refer to later, and some like to use
charts or other forms of categorisation to help them do this, as in Figure 3.

In each column we can note down things we heard, whether they were particularly good or incorrect or
inappropriate. We might write down errors such as according to my opinion in the words and phrases column, or
haven't been yesterday in the grammar column; we might record phoneme problems or stress issues in the
pronunciation column and make a note of places where students disagreed too tentatively or bluntly in the
appropriacy column.

Unit 3 19 Module 5
 We can also record students' language performance with audio or video recorders. In this situation the
students might be asked to design their own charts like the one above so that when they listen or watch,
they, too, will be writing down more and less successful language performance in categories which make
remembering what they heard easier. Another alternative is to divide students into groups and have each
group listen or watch for something different. For example, one group might focus on pronunciation, one
group could listen for the use of appropriate or inappropriate phrases, while a third looks at the effect of the
physical paralinguistic features that are used. If teachers want to involve students more - especially if they
have been listening to an audiotape or watching a video - they can ask them to write up any mistakes they
think they heard on the board. This can lead to a discussion in which the class votes on whether they think
the mistakes really are mistakes.
Another possibility is for the teacher to transcribe parts of the recording for future study. However, this
takes a lot of time!
 After the event: when we have recorded student performance, we will want to give feedback to the
class. We can do this in a number of ways. We might want to give an assessment of an activity,
saying how well we thought the students did in it, and getting the students to tell us what they found
easiest or most difficult. We can put some of the mistakes we have recorded up on the board and
ask students first if they can recognise the problem, and then whether they can put it right.
Alternatively, we can write both correct and incorrect words, phrases or sentences on the board and
have the students decide which is which. When we write examples of what we heard on the board, it
is not generally a good idea to say who made the mistakes since this may expose students in front
of their classmates. Indeed, we will probably want to concentrate most on those mistakes which
were made by more than one person. These can then lead on to quick teaching and re-teaching
sequences. Another possibility is for teachers to write individual notes to students, recording
mistakes they heard from those particular students with suggestions about where they might look for
information about the language - in dictionaries, grammar books or on the Internet.

Involving students
So far we have discussed the teacher)s feedback to students. But we can also encourage students to give
feedback to each other. Such peer review has an extremely positive effect on group cohesion. It encourages
students to monitor each other and, as a result, helps them to become better at self monitoring. James
Muncie suggests a further advantage, namely that whereas students see teacher comment as coming from
an expert, as a result of which they feel obliged to do what is suggested, even when we are only making
suggestions, they are much more likely to be provoked into thinking about what they are writing if the
feedback comes from one of their peers (Muncie 2000). Thus when responding to work during the drafting
stage peer feedback is potentially extremely beneficial. However, in order to make sure that the comment is
focused we might want to design a form such as the one suggested by Victoria Chan (2001) where students
are given sentences to complete such as My immediate reactions to your piece of writing are ... , I like the
part ... , I'm not sure about ... , The specific language errors I have noticed are ... ) etc.

In her book on writing, Tricia Hedge suggests letting the students decide (with teacher guidance) what
they think the most important things to look out for in a piece of writing are (Hedge 1988:54). They can give
their opinions about whether spelling is more important than handwriting or whether originality of ideas
should interest the feedback giver more than, say, grammatical correctness. They can be asked for their
opinions on the best grading system, too. In consultation with the teacher, therefore, they can come up with
their own feedback kit.
We can also encourage students to self-monitor by getting them to write a checklist of things to look out
for when they evaluate their own work during the drafting process (Harmer 2004: 121). The more we
encourage them to be involved in giving feedback to each other, or to evaluate their own work successfully,
the better they will be able to develop as successful writers.

Finishing the feedback process

Except where students are taking achievement tests, written feedback is designed not just to give an
assessment of the students' work, but also to help and teach. We give feedback because we want to affect

Unit 3 20 Module 5
our students' language use in the future as well as comment upon its use in the past. When we respond to
first and second written drafts of a written assignment, therefore, we expect a new version to be produced
which will show how the students have responded to our comments. In this way feedback is part of a
learning process, and we will not have wasted our time. Our reason for using codes and symbols is the
same: if students can identify the mistakes they have made, they are then in a position to correct them. The
feedback process is only really finished once they have made these changes. And if students consult
grammar books or dictionaries as a way of resolving some of the mistakes we have signalled for them, the
feedback we have given has had a positive outcome. If, on the contrary, when we return corrected work, the
students put it straight into a file or lose it, then the time we spent responding or correcting has been
completely wasted.

Adapted from The Practice of English Language Teaching, Jeremy Harmer 2007, Longman.

To consolidate your understanding, do this self-check.

SELF-CHECK 3:5 7

Which of these two exercises will be of more help to a student to fix the given error?

The student wrote in an essay:

I have bought this watch two days ago. This is the best watch I had in my life.

Exercise 1

Write in the correct form of the verb shown in parentheses to complete the sentence. Add
auxiliary verbs if necessary.

Example:

We (wait) ____have been waiting______ for the bus for 20 minutes already.

1. Jason (work) ___________________ for a fast-food chain at the moment.

2. Last year he (live) ________________ in New York City.
3. When he finishes college, he (go) _______________ back to Liverpool.
4. If Jason had not gone to college, he (not get) _____________ __________ a
good job.
5. At this time next year, he (work) ___________________ for his father's
business.

Exercise 2

Underline the correct option in each sentence.

Example:
We travelled/have travelled to Spain last summer.

Unit 3 21 Module 5
 1. Columbus discovered/has discovered America in 1492.
2. I downloaded/have downloaded six albums of the band so far. I'm going to
download the remaining 2.
3. Have you seen/Did you see the new headmaster yet?
4. When I heard on the radio that there was a huge traffic jam on the motorway, I
decided/have decided to take a train.
5. It snowed/has snowed a lot last January.

COMMENT

You are right if you chose the second exercise. Remedial exercises need a
clear and ‘tight’ focus on a specific point. There are too many tenses in the
first exercise and too much information for the students to cope with. The
second one focuses clearly on the difference between the use of the past
simple and the present perfect. It reinforces the point that if a time period in
the past is mentioned, the present perfect cannot be used.

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Unit 3 22 Module 5