ELT News Think Tank

This Month's Think Tank Panel

Julian Edge

Marc Helgesen

Peter Viney

Setsuko Toyama

Panelists: Julian Edge | Marc | Peter | Setsuko
Readers Comments: Abdellatif Zoubair | James Corbett
Date: May 2000

Topic: "When and how should I correct my students?"

Julian Edge

My most direct and concise response to this question must be: At those times and in those ways that you think will be of most help to your students

I'm not trying to be funny here. The underlying message that this answer tries to establish is:

* You don't correct just because a student says something that isn't standard English. You respond to what they say as a potential step in their learning.

* Only you, that student's teacher, can take responsibility for the actual decisions of when and how to correct, because only you are in a position to gauge what is helpful at what point in the student's learning. There are no simple, linguistic rules to apply.

Having said that, here are some working guidelines that I find helpful in making those decisions over and over again. (I'm restricting myself here to talking about mistakes of structure, although it is worth remembering that native speakers will forgive structural mistakes – it is when they think that a foreigner is being impolite that they forget that that person is a learner and probably does not mean what the native speaker hears. I make the point here because correction for appropriacy and politeness can be much more important than structure if your students expect to interact with naïve, and frequently insensitive, monolingual speakers of English.)

1. I like to talk to students about correction, and being corrected. I listen to their preferences and explain my own.

2. I make it clear that some stages of some lessons will feature a focus on accuracy (when practising a new structure, for example) and that some will feature an emphasis on fluency and communication (when working together on a group task, perhaps). I explain why.

3. When we are focusing on correctness, I think of students' mistakes in three ways and respond accordingly:

slips
If I think that a student can self-correct, I call their attention to the fact that a mistake has been made, and give them time to self-correct.

errors
If I think (or it becomes obvious) that an individual student can't self-correct, but I think that someone else might be able to, I invite the rest of the group to help out.

If I find myself in a position where I am focusing on accuracy, and no one in the class can correct a mistake, then I have to realise that we are no longer talking about students' mistakes, we are talking about my failure to teach. I have to think about how I will re-teach this point in some other way.

Beyond slips and errors, sometimes a learner will try to express something that is simply beyond their grammatical ability. I call these 'attempts.'

attempts
There is no point in trying to "correct" something that a person has not learnt. But it can be useful to reformulate what you think that they wanted to say and offer this back to them. So, if someone says,

"I wish I was go to the beach yesterday – it was so hot,"

you might say,

"Yes, I wish I'd gone to the beach, too."

I find that I can use these three categories of mistake and three types of response in both spoken and written English and I hope they might prove useful to you:

slips self-correction
errors peer correction
attempts teacher reformulation

The essential point about correction is to think of it as feedback to a growing organism. Learners need information about the external target forms they are aiming for, and they need to believe that the essential internal language development is taking place inside themselves.

It ain't easy, that's for sure.

Panelists: Julian | Marc | Peter | Setsuko |
Readers Comments: Abdellatif Zoubair | James Corbett

Julian Edge, Aston Univerisity

Author of Essentials of English Language Teaching

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