【教研】Correcting Oral Errors

国外教学研究论文：Most teachers agree we should respond positively to errors because they’re evidence of learning taking place. But most language teachers probably correct their students too much and in a limited number of ways. Here’s what the experts say: Correction has little effect on language acquisition. (Krashen), or The provision of negative feedback does not appear to lead to accurate performance, at least not immediately. (Ellis)
Language learners want to speak correctly as fast as possible. However, we’re often too insistent on everything being correct and thus, ironically, slowing language learning down. By not moving on to something new until the latest items have been fully assimilated/produced, we prevent students from communicating as much as they could if we more readily allowed things like, I’m not agree, Fernando de Noronha is a island beautiful or I was with a lot of luck, all of which are perfectly understandable. I’d like to see ELT give much greater priority to fluency and teachers stop correcting so much, or at least stop correcting individual errors so often with the whole class as and when they come up. It’s generally better to deal only with major whole class errors in this way or intervene immediately only when students are incomprehensible. Hence the checklist of techniques and priorities below, intended to help you respond in a more varied, personal way.
I regularly get students to talk in the past as soon as they know a few verbs, well before our books/syllabuses suggest we allow them to. They can ask and answer (with or without do), e.g. (Do) You see the match yesterday? Yes, it’s very good. Where (do) you go at the weekend? I stay here all weekend all totally comprehensible. Yet we force then to wait until the second semester or Year 2, only talking about the past after they’ve had the 3rd person S ground into them. If your learners forget the 3rd person S, so what? My son still does and he’s a 5-year old native speaker, but I’ve never corrected him. He’ll get there when he needs to. It’s one of the last things native speakers acquire but one of the first we insist on as teachers which is inappropriate as it rarely affects meaning or blocks comprehension. Remember, by definition, the communicative approach should prioritise successful communication over ‘failed’ grammar.
We also need to re-consider the models of English both we and our students aspire to. None of our students will ever be native speakers, so we should be much more upfront about this, and help students see and strive for more realistic aims. In future native speaker English may well be seen as a quaint archaic dialect! Obviously not yet, but is it so far away? Just look at the emergence of Spanglish in the USA and its massive impact on American English.
We should stop advocating the native speaker as the ‘perfect model’ and define a more relevant model of English as our goal. As a former school owner, I preferred good non-native speaker teachers to inexperienced native speakers, as they were better professionals and a much more appropriate, realistic and achievable model for students to aspire to.
I’m sure the future will bring ever less teaching of native-like idiomatic English. Over 80% of the English spoken today doesn’t involve a native speaker as an interlocutor. The emergence of English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) has enormous implications for the way we teach, yet doesn’t yet seem to have changed the way many teachers think about mistakes, nor how they correct them. EFL teachers cannot ignore this. ELF is by definition a ‘pidgin’ language, i.e. a third language used as a bridge between people who don’t share a common first language. Pidgins tend to simplify and regularise both lexis and grammar (see e.g. the songs of Bob Marley or the improvements Americans are making to British English spelling and grammar). The English we teach will become more pidgin-like to recognise the most common language forms used by non-native ELF-users, including a lot of forms now considered to be errors. The problem now is that we don’t yet know enough about emerging Global English, to be able to describe or syllabus it so the status quo continues. Not for long however, e.g. the University of Vienna’s voice corpus is now beginning to produce valuable ELF data which will shape syllabuses of the future.
A useful suggestion for mono-lingual classes as most still are in Brazil is for you to record two students from an Intermediate class performing an activity from your Elementary coursebook, e.g. a roleplay. Then play this recording as a listening model for the lower group for them to then try to do the same thing. It’s very motivating and sometimes the elementary group produce something as good or better than the students a year ahead of them! By showing students that the most realistic model to which they can aspire is to be a higher level Brazilian English speaker, not a failed or flawed native speaker, we make it immediately obvious to them what their goals should be and what they will soon be able to do if they keep studying. The sooner all students become aware of this, the better for us all.
Try to make better use of ‘student-modelled’ materials like this, e.g. before any free writing activity, give students a model from the previous year (either a photocopy of the best one produced by your last class at this level or an invented one from you) with the typical anticipated mistakes circled, to show students what to avoid. Tell them this is best one from last year, to see if they can do better. The result is nearly always a better composition with fewer mistakes and so less marking for you!
Rather than correct after students have fallen into predictable traps, we should also pre-teach more to help avoid errors. With mono-lingual classes as we have in Brazil, it’s much easier to predict errors than with a multi-lingual class. Our methodology here should be very different from that used in an English-speaking country. We can pre-teach more based on the errors we know students will make from our experience and through mother tongue transfer. For example, prepare sentences with typical errors for students to correct them, tell funny stories about errors of your own or those made by previous classes in order to help students avoid making them at all, keep a list of funny errors on the wall for students to laugh at and learn from, etc.
So why bother correcting at all?
Despite what the experts say and all these new models of English, we do still have to correct our students. It’s part of our job and if we don’t correct them, who will? We’re not giving private lessons but teaching groups and learning in this way is not at all the same as acquiring language abroad, or a one-to-one class. We need to ensure students are exposed to accurate models and besides, most students expect to be corrected and can get confused if others go uncorrected for long. The key is variety, hence the following list.
Ways to react to and correct oral errors
e.g. If one student says ‘My sister love Paulo Zulu.’ Obviously how you react will depend on who said it, when in the lesson, the size/level of the class, that day’s aims and so on, but here are fifteen options to choose from:
• Ignore (and praise), e.g. Good. Does she? And does he love her? This is very often the best option when the student is perfectly comprehensible.
• Pause / give another chance, e.g. ask Sorry? to see if the student corrects him/herself when saying it again. This is the fairest way to see if it is a slip or intentional, and if the student can repair the error for him/herself. If not, unless the 3rd person form is your accuracy aim for the day I suggest you make a mental note and move on.
• Ask the student to repeat the phrase and then you elicit correction non-verbally, e.g. counting out the words on your fingers, gesture, raising an eyebrow, etc.
•Offer to the student or class for correction without indicating where, e.g. Nearly, Anybody? and if they can’t then do so yourself. The problem here is that students don’t usually listen closely enough to each other, especially in larger classes and so you end up forcing the student to repeat the error (when he/she now knows it is wrong) or echo it yourself, which is probably better done as below.
• Echo to elicit correction from the student him/herself or class: She love Paulo? Many teachers are reluctant to echo students’ mistakes but if done gently, it immediately brings the problem into focus for all concerned, allowing for fast, efficient and effective correction. I only use echo for this purpose, never echoing their answers to my questions or exercises from the book, so students know that when I do echo, there’s an error to correct.
•Repeat up to the error with rising intonation to elicit correction: Your sister …?
•Identify the error and elicit: Not she love but she …
•Identify the error and elicit correction through grammar (Tense?) or exemplification: I love, you love, she …?
•Correct yourself (repeating / rephrasing) and immediately move on: My sister loves Paulo. or Oh she loves him?, then ask, e.g. And what about you? This reformulation by you is often not really correction as the student is unlikely to notice because he/she is already thinking about the answer to your question, but is a natural response and does help the rest of the class to hear the correct form.
•Correct yourself and drill: My sister loves Paulo. Again.
•Tell them in a powerful way: e.g. with exaggeration, She lovesssss (with or without repetition)
•Make a mental or written note of the error for later correction, e.g. write it on the board or on an OHP, or include in a handout of errors next lesson. Or you can dictate sentences based on errors for the student him/herself, pairs or the whole class to identify and correct
•Whisper the error/correct form in his/her ear later, when you have a moment
•Write it on a slip of paper which you give to the student when you have a moment
•Make the student him/herself write it down (several times!) in a personal context. Old-fashioned but effective for those repeated errors which really drive you mad!
I’m sure you can come up with more. If so, I’d love to hear from you at my email below.
Pairwork and groupwork oral options
•Students can try to correct any errors they may hear from their partner as they go along. Or ask their teacher if they aren’t sure. Or note each others’ mistakes and queries to deal with later. Or at least keep a note of any words they use in Portuguese during an activity. If you don’t tell them to do so, they won’t, but if you do and show them how, some of them just might!
•Students can give a signal to their partner when they hear a mistake, e.g. knock twice on the desk, pinch, lightly slap (or even kiss!) each other to indicate an error for their partner who made the mistake to try to correct him/herself.
•A third student can act as the “observer” or “secretary”, sitting outside two or three pairs, noting down some of these things to deal with later.
Non-verbal correction
Non-verbal techniques are equally effective. For example, many teachers draw and point to a large S on the board, have a snake or spider which they throw at students, or just hold up three fingers to indicate the 3rd person S, to prompt students to self correct. One my best buys in Brazil was an inflatable, plastic Superman (5 reais outside Congonhas airport). For years I’d been searching the world for the famous 3rd person. ‘Who do they mean?’, I asked myself. ‘Where can this person be?’ Well now I’d found him - it was Superman all along! So I keep him hanging in my classroom and, whenever anyone makes an error with the 3rd person S, I just point at his chest to remind them that ‘he’ needs an S. The whole class notice the error, the student can correct him/herself if need be, either aloud or just under his/her breath, and we can move on without having to elicit and drill the correct form. Soon students begin to do this for each other and constantly seeing him on the wall helps remind them to self-correct when working in pairs too. Simple, quick and efficient, this works equally well for plural S and the possessive ‘S.
A good idea Jack Scholes gave me was the idea of ‘anchoring’ correction. He suggested always going to the same place in the classroom and assuming the same posture/gestures/facial expression when you want to correct. Once the students become aware that this is where/how you stand when you want to correct, you need only move there/mime your position for them to know that there is something wrong.
I also keep three quotes on my classroom wall to help students see that errors are natural and nothing to worry about:
1 - Learn from the mistakes of others: you can’t live long enough to make them all yourself!
2 - He who never made a mistake never made a discovery. (Samuel Smiles)
3 - If you’re not making mistakes you’re not trying hard enough. (Allan R Sandage)
Think for a second about the third one. Imagine a class where students weren’t making any errors. It’d be a waste of time. What would they be learning?
Oral correction: priorities
Oral correction is often a waste of time unless it makes an impact. To impact:
•Discuss correction with classes, e.g. ask them what they want / tell them what’s possible, eg negotiate a correction contract. I frequently correct as many errors as possible in one lesson, then leave all the errors I can uncorrected in the next, then ask classes which teacher they prefer: the ‘fascist’ or the ‘hippy’! They express their correction preferences, we negotiate what is/isn’t feasible or desirable, using Portuguese where necessary, and thus they understand and feel a part of correction policy. Make errors and correction a class responsibility, not just your job. The sooner you do, the easier it becomes to make good progress.
•Think twice before you jump in! Pause before you rush in and correct – once you’ve started, it can be very difficult to escape without losing several precious class minutes you’d intended for other activity. Uncorrected mistakes will not necessarily stick or self-propagate. It’s usually better to wait and see what happens next time.
•Invest more time in opportunities to get things right through a lot of varied practice rather than painstaking, repeated correction by you.
•Be selective and avoid drowning students in corrections. Be clear what you’re concentrating on and don’t lose sight of your other objectives, Focus on main or pre-agreed errors only, or general points for the whole class.
•Spend less time on correcting individual errors with the whole class. Use other techniques for specific individual errors, as and when appropriate.
•Correct only at appropriate stages, e.g. during initial practice, as a reward for good pairwork or fluency exercises, or when students become unintelligible. Perhaps save most of the errors you collect and then hold a regular correction class, e.g. once a month.
•Focus on patterns so students can remember words / corrections together rather than in isolation.
•Try to be efficient in the short time we have available in class, e.g. a visual technique to notice the error without forcing production. Time is a great teacher but unfortunately it kills all its students! (Hector Berlioz) So, make the best use of the short time you have, both in and out of class.
•Find ways to help students notice their errors, to ask themselves why it’s wrong and then provide plenty of personalised practice. Get students to record their errors too. Try to achieve as much self-correction as possible. It is easily the most powerful form of correction, as mistakes only disappear when an internal change has taken place.
•Above all, enjoy your teaching – if you don’t, who will?http://www.ryedu.net/syy/yyjx/201201/24616.html 百度搜索 谷歌搜索