about students' errors
Moderators: Dimitris, maneki neko2, Lorikeet, Enrico Palazzo, superpeach, cecil2, Mr. Kalgukshi2
about students' errors
What do you think a language teacher should do about students' errors and mistakes that are made during a communicative activity?
If the objective of your activity is communication and fluency, then correction of errors during the activity should probably be kept to a minimum - the students need to practise communicating, and need to develop coping strategies to get their message across. If you constantly correct, you will interrupt the students' flow and fluency and therefore undermine the objective.
A good thing to do though, is to make notes of errors during the activity. It's useful to distinguish between genuine errors and "slips" at this point:
An error in this context is where a student makes a mistake through lack of understanding - perhaps he/she doesn't understand a grammatical structure or uses a word incorrectly.
A slip is where a student understands, but just "forgets" - a typical example with many students would be the use of third person 's'. Most students know and understand this, but just forget to use it half the time. (Imagine what would happen to the flow of the activity if you interrupted it for every one of these slips.)
So, make a note of genuine errors, and then use them after the activity. Write them on the board during a break in the class, and get students to correct them in pairs when they come back. Or give out the list of errors to be corrected as homework.
Hope this helps!
Keith
http://www.eslbase.com/
A good thing to do though, is to make notes of errors during the activity. It's useful to distinguish between genuine errors and "slips" at this point:
An error in this context is where a student makes a mistake through lack of understanding - perhaps he/she doesn't understand a grammatical structure or uses a word incorrectly.
A slip is where a student understands, but just "forgets" - a typical example with many students would be the use of third person 's'. Most students know and understand this, but just forget to use it half the time. (Imagine what would happen to the flow of the activity if you interrupted it for every one of these slips.)
So, make a note of genuine errors, and then use them after the activity. Write them on the board during a break in the class, and get students to correct them in pairs when they come back. Or give out the list of errors to be corrected as homework.
Hope this helps!
Keith
http://www.eslbase.com/