Error Correction And The Written Work of EFL And ESL Students
By: Todd Long
Submitted: 2010-11-08 06:05:00 | Word Count: 709
Error correction is often not followed up, for a number of reasons. Perhaps teachers feel that students should be responsible for their own learning, and of course they should, but they have to be taught to take responsibility. If you correct errors in students’ writing, what follow up is there?
Explain What is Required Clearly
If you are correcting errors, what do you ask the students to do? You should explain clearly what is required of them when they have work corrected. You should not ask students to simply copy a spelling correction, as there is little point in a student doing this unless he/she has a photographic memory. A word written in isolation is meaningless in this context.
Ask student to write no fewer than three sentences containing the target word and check that the meanings are correct when next you mark the student’s work. If they are not done, give the student one more chance to do the work set, and reiterate why it is important to correct mistakes. It is important because if mistakes are not corrected, the student’s language will not improve and the mistakes will remain, becoming fossilized. In other words, the student will not learn from his/her mistakes and so lose out on an important learning opportunity. Perhaps you should explain that everyone makes mistakes and they are a valuable part of our learning process, so that students are encouraged to feel that they are not being penalized for their mistakes.
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What You Should Correct
Sometimes a student’s work is so full of mistakes that you feel you should not correct all of them; of course you are right. It is very demoralizing for students to see the teacher’s red ink all over their carefully written homework. For this reason, try to use blue or black ink for corrections, or even a glitter pen, so that the marks are not so strident.
If a student makes the same error more than once, it should be underscored only once or marked with the appropriate symbols. If you use symbols, these should be displayed prominently in the classroom. Correct errors rather than mistakes. When a student has the correct word or grammatical structure in the writing somewhere, then it is not an error but could just be a slip of the pen.
Any self-correction should not be marked as an error. Native speakers also have lapses and spell something wrongly in one place and correctly several times afterward. In examinations, there is a slightly different attitude to this, as students could be hedging their bets; but in classwork this is less likely, as there’s less at stake, so you can afford to be lenient.
Making an Activity out of Errors
If you decide to tackle errors then you can put students into small groups of 3 or 4 according to the errors they have in common. For example one group might consistently confuse "there" and "their;" another might get the conditionals wrong, and another may not be able to maser the definite and indefinite articles usage. Put them into groups according to errors and ability levels where possible.
If the group are working on a project or dealing with a particular cross-curricular theme, then have them work on this in the error correction activity. For example, they may be learning about pollution, so the group which confused "there" and "their" could be asked to write about industries and how they pollute the atmosphere. The group needing to work on conditionals could write a "What if…?" text about what they would do if they owned a factory which was causing damage to the environment. The third group could be asked to write about the problem of an illegal rubbish dump and residents' responses to it.
Now you have created a shared writing activity in which one student acts as scribe and editor and the others pool ideas and decide on the structure of their texts. They can all be involved in the editing process, so that when you finally read it, each piece of work should have few mistakes. The work can be displayed in the classroom, so that students are reminded of the task and the value of learning from mistakes.
