Methodology: Alternatives to whole class feedback

Methodology: Alternatives to whole class feedback

Author: Amanda Gamble

Type: article

Amanda Gamble wins the September 2007 Methodology Challenge with some practical answers to a Forum question about whole class feedback.

Could anyone tell me how to properly give feedback during a lesson. Usually, I do whole class feedback but would like to use different methods if possible.
Thanks in advance for your help.

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Introduction

Take a look at the following classroom exchange:

Teacher:  ... and what’s the answer to number 3?
Whole class:  He bought a sandwich. (Sea of noise in which the teacher hears the answer)
Teacher:  And number 4?
Whole class:  He drank orange juice. (Sea of noise in which the teacher hears the answer)

Sound familiar? How many times have you done feedback like this? Probably many. Why do we fall into the pattern of getting feedback in this way? Is it the easiest way? The quickest?

When I first started teaching, I always did feedback like this. It took some time for me to realize that this kind of feedback was only for me. It was a way for me to check if the students had the correct answers. While I could pick out the correct answer from a sea of noise, many of my students couldn’t. I used to think, "I’ve done a good job. My students understand!" but then I began to realize that generally it was only the stronger or the more confident students who would shout out the answers.  When I looked at individual student’s work, I saw that they didn’t always have the correct answer and, more importantly, they didn’t know what the correct answer was. 

What are the drawbacks of whole class feedback?

• The teacher is in control and decides when to move onto the next question.
• The teacher is probably doing most of the talking.
• Just because the teacher has heard someone say the answer it doesn’t mean that all the students know what the correct answer is.
• This method doesn’t help weaker students – they often get lost during the feedback, especially if they have a lot of incorrect answers.

More importantly, it doesn’t tell the teacher what problems the students had with the activity or if they need further practice. However, the most crucial factor is that students don’t learn anything from this kind of feedback – all they get from it is ‘He drank orange juice’ is correct. They don’t learn WHY it is correct or why, for example, ‘He has drunk orange juice’ is wrong. 

In a communicative, learner-centred classroom whole class feedback goes against the grain. The teacher is in control and the students learn little if anything from the process. However, in many communicative, learner-centred classrooms I’ve seen, the feedback process has still been teacher-centred.

Anchor Point:3 Feedback – a neglected idea?

I’ve been thinking about this subject a lot in the last couple of years. I’ve been asked to do workshops on it and have wanted to do these because of what I have seen during classroom observations. It’s not such an easy thing to give a workshop on because you have to do activities first in order to get feedback on them. And look in the reference books – can you find anything about feedback? Not much. I’ve come to the conclusion that this area has been somewhat neglected.

However, I should first define what I mean by ‘feedback’. There are different types of feedback:

·         Giving students an idea of how they’ve done after a speaking activity – looking at both their errors and the good things they have said.

·         Asking students what they think about an activity they have done or to reflect on recent classes.

·         Checking the answers to activities the students have done.

I want to concentrate on the third one. So students have completed an exercise and now the teacher wants to check the answers. What alternative ways are available to us? Take a look at the following ideas:

1.    Give the students an answer key or put the answer key on the wall or the board.

2.    Give each student the answer to one or more questions – they read out for the class to check.

3.    One student has the answer key and plays the teacher.

4.    Get students to write the answers on the board.

5.    Get one student to read out his/her answers – the rest of the class see if they have the same.

6.    Coursebooks sometimes encourage students to listen to the answers.

7.    Give the students a reading text with all the answers in.

8.    Students nominate each other to say the answer.

9.    Do it as a competition – students work in teams to check their answers and then get points.

10. Teacher monitors while students are on task and makes a note of common problems to concentrate on in feedback.

Anchor Point:4 Why do these?

1. To encourage learner autonomy – the teacher won’t always be there to provide answers. If you put the key on the wall, it also gets the students out of their seats for a few minutes. You can make it more fun by getting them to run to the walls, find the answers and go back to tell their partners – a bit like a running dictation OR give half the answers to one person and the other half to their partner. They share their information like an information gap activity.

2. Although the teacher provides the answers, the students are in control of the feedback.

3. I saw this done really well in an observation. The student with the answer key has to be able to answer questions asked by the class to make it more effective.

4. This is a good way to deal with early finishers.

5. This works well if students have different answers to questions because they can discuss the answer and come to an agreed conclusion.

6. A good way to introduce intensive listening into your classroom with a real purpose.

7. An alternative way to get the students reading in your class. It practises scanning skills and, like 6, has a real purpose.

8. A student-centred version of whole class feedback. It works better if students choose the questions to answer at random as it keeps them on their toes and encourages them to listen to each other. 

9. Makes the feedback more interesting and fun and could help to change the pace of the lesson.

10. This saves time going through answers which the students have got correct and gives more time to work on the answers they got wrong and think about the reasons why.

This leads me onto my next point. A further reason why the above techniques are useful, when compared to whole class feedback, is that error correction can be dealt with. Some of the techniques above will allow for discussion of the answers more easily than others, for example 2, 3 and 10. Doing this with number 9 would distract the students’ attention away from the competitive element, although it could be done afterwards. 

One of the drawbacks of whole class, teacher-led feedback is that there is little chance for the students to discuss their answers. For feedback to be effective and worthwhile, students need the opportunity to talk about their answers so that they can see why the correct answer is right and why the incorrect one is wrong (as I mentioned earlier). In this way, we can encourage students to learn from their mistakes. It also gives us valuable feedback on our teaching. If we see that students have had a problem with particular questions, we probably need to ‘re-teach’ or at least review this area again.

Anchor Point:5 What to do before feedback with the class

Before using any of these techniques, it’s important for students to check their answers together with a partner. This gives students confidence and a chance to communicate in English to discuss their answers. As the teacher, you might have to help a bit here so that they don’t slip into L1 as may sometimes happen. You can give them ‘task language’ such as:

I think...
What do you think about...
I think so too  / Me too
I don’t. I think...

If you get students used to giving each other feedback after activities and introduce the appropriate task language, not only will the students get a chance to discuss their answers but they will also have an opportunity to use language. It could be a good opportunity to get them practising, for example, agreeing and disagreeing, negotiating meaning etc. In this way, feedback has a real communicative purpose. 

Other things to do before getting class feedback:

·         Getting students to check their answers in pairs is a good way to mix the students up and get them moving around for a few minutes. 

·         If you have a student who always finishes before everyone else, look at his/her answers and tell him/her how many he has got wrong but not which ones. This is a good way to keep an early finisher busy for a little while longer while the others catch up. It’s also a good way to get students to look at their answers again – something I find very few of my students do especially in tests or exams, so this is a good strategy to encourage.

Anchor Point:6 Some issues to consider

So, back to the techniques of checking answers with the whole class. It’s all well and good having these alternative ways but there are some issues to consider when choosing which technique is the most appropriate.

·         Time – If it only took the students five minutes to complete the exercise but the feedback takes 15 minutes, then this probably isn’t the most efficient use of time.

·         Level – Lower level students might have some difficulties with some of the above – number 3 for example.

·         Activity type – A True/False activity would suit number 4 but would probably be pointless for number 2.

Anchor Point:7

The role of learner training

Before using these techniques with your students you will probably need to give them some learner training. Issues you will need to consider are:

Issues	Solutions
Students need to understand the purpose behind using different feedback techniques.	They will learn and understand more if they are in control of the feedback as it will be more meaningful and they will be involved in communication for a real purpose.
Some students might not feel comfortable being told an answer by another student.	Encourage a positive classroom atmosphere and use activities at the beginning of a new class that build the dynamics.
Some students might feel uncomfortable about having this kind of responsibility.	Students need to be encouraged that they can learn from each other and that the teacher isn’t the ‘fountain of all knowledge’.
Students don’t know how to check answers for themselves.	When you introduce the different techniques, show the students what to do. You can also encourage them to self-check outside the class by setting homework and getting them to look at an answer key as many workbooks encourage nowadays.

These techniques need to be introduced at an early stage so that students see them as part of everyday classroom life.

Anchor Point:8 Conclusion

My aim here has been to suggest some alternative ways of getting feedback on activities. If we use student-centred activities in our classrooms, it’s also important to support these with student-centred feedback. Using some or all of the different techniques I have suggested will mean that feedback has a real, more meaningful and communicative purpose and that students will learn something from the process.

Staging fluency activities

Author: Maria Leedham

Type: article

From the onestopenglish archive: Maria Leedham wins the Methodology Challenge with an article about staging fluency activities. She suggests some practical steps to maximizing the participation of all students during speaking lessons.

Getting contributions from all

I did an activity where students are divided into two teams and each team argues for the merits of a specified thing - its importance to mankind. One team might argue for the sea; the other for the flute, then they’re given different things to argue for. The argument was dominated by three students (in a class of nine). How can I get a better spread of contribution with this particular activity? any thoughts on seating arrangements; modifications to the activity; anything else?
Cheers.

richardc

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Pre-task preparation | Classroom layout | The task | Other fluency activities | References

Richard – Your activity sounds interesting and stimulating, with the proviso that the students need to be outgoing enough to contribute. Clearly, some of them have decided to sit back as it’s an easier option. I’ll suggest some changes to this activity first, then consider other fluency activities you could use to get everyone talking.

Anchor Point:1 Pre-task preparation

To start with, the warming-up phase is the most important part of any skills activity. You could begin by asking students to tell their partner what things they think are important to mankind then eliciting these to the whiteboard. Then set the scene for the task by taking in a picture or even a flute if you have one! (Realia always grabs people’s interest, especially when it’s something unusual for the classroom!).

Make sure students are equipped with the vocabulary to carry out the task. With your task they need some language to do with the sea (breaking waves, tide coming in, vast oceans, etc.) and music (pop, classical, rap, write lyrics, etc.). Teaching these in chunks rather than single words helps them to stick in learners’ minds and aids recall. You don’t say what level the class is and this of course has a bearing on the lexis you teach. Students also need to be equipped with the language of persuasion (But don’t you think… , I agree in part but on the other hand…). You can extend what they have already here.

Think carefully about your instructions before you issue them. Sounds basic but it’s one I still hold to after fifteen years of teaching. Think through the words you’ll use beforehand – no need to actually write them out unless it helps you to remember. How will you check students understand? Modelling is one way, or you could ask a student to repeat what they have to do. At this point you should be clear on whether you want to impose the two positions on students or whether you’ll give them the choice. A free choice is more natural, but you may find the numbers don’t work. Alternatively you could put students into two groups and ask each group to decide on the object or entity they’re going to defend. 

Once they start on the actual activity give students plenty of time to think and prepare in pairs before they do the scary part of speaking in front of the whole class (see Martin Bygate in Challenge and Change for more on this). Perhaps they could write down their own ideas individually, then share these with a partner before getting into their groups of four and five. This way students have practised formulating their ideas once, and next time around the content will come easily so they can concentrate on how they express the ideas. It’s a big confidence boost too, as they know their ideas are valid and comprehensible before they put them forward to a larger group. This organization from individual to pairs then fours and finally whole class is often referred to as a pyramid discussion.

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Anchor Point:2 Classroom layout

Seating is important for the main task, as you recognize in your question. Until now, students have probably been in circular groups. If the chairs are fixed or there’s not much room (you’re probably OK with just nine but this applies to a larger group) then you could get alternate rows to turn round and talk to the row behind them. For the main task, then, the two groups could turn and face each other in two lines as here:

Teacher / Chairperson

X                X
X                X
X                X
X                X
X                X
                  X

This looks a bit confrontational with more than 8 or 9 students – you could have them behind each other in that case:

Teacher / Chairperson

                      X  
XX               XX
XX               XX

Having students in a line or groups facing each other is helpful as they form two distinct ‘sides’ and you’ll hopefully get a heated argument going!

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Anchor Point:3 The task

It’s good if each person within the group has a part to play – maybe they can divide up their points so each student has an argument to put forward. Or you could make it a game and insist that everyone speaks! This obviously has to be done in a light-hearted manner so you don’t seem overly fierce. Each person could have a counter which they put down when they’ve contributed, or two or five counters. Will you act as chair or will one of the class? It’s a good role to include if you have odd numbers and one member is more articulate / confident than the rest. It’s hard to know how long the actual debate will take, probably a case of playing it by ear and moving on when students dry up. You could then take a vote and see if anyone has swapped sides! Or both sides could simply agree to disagree. So at the end of the task, what then? A summary of the debate is useful – either by you or the chairperson if you have one or each side could sum up their position.

Next it’s time for a focus on form slot. Research shows that this is helpful in pushing forward students’ learning (look at Peter Skehan’s chapter in Challenge and Change). I think it’s appreciated by students too – and it makes your class different from a nice chat down the pub! This language slot could be simply items to correct that you noticed during the discussion. If you’re really organized you could write them straight down on an overhead transparency (OHT) while students are speaking as this saves time later. I divide my OHT into sections beforehand: vocabulary that I noticed students searching for or misusing, grammar areas to work on (write down the incorrect utterance) and pronunciation (I write items down in phonetic script). Stick the OHT on the projector and give pairs time to discuss it before looking at it together as a plenary. I never name names on the OHT and no-one seems to mind if their incorrect language is up there!

A different focus on form could be achieved by recording part of students’ talk. The pairwork part is probably easiest as two people are clearer on a tape than nine. Students can transcribe their share of the talk – or just a two-minute stretch if it’s a longer than this – then they can work on improving their collocations. These words which go together (strong sea not heavy sea, for example) are tricky for students to get to grips with yet vital for them to sound natural. I’ve listed a helpful website in the references which you can direct students to.

That could be the end of the activity. Or, you could complete the task loop in true Task Based Learning style by listening to a native speaker recording of the same task – this could be part of the focus on form section (look at Jane Willis’ very readable account in Framework for guidance here). Pick out language the speakers used to help them to persuade others. Following this – or instead – you could provide a practice opportunity for the extra language taught by giving a second similar task.

Here’s a quick overview of the lesson structure I’m suggesting:

5-10 minutes       warmer
5 minutes             vocabulary eliciting
5-10 minutes       setting up the task and thinking individually
5-10 minutes       pairwork on the task
10 minutes          groups of 4 and 5 exchange ideas and prepare their arguments
15+ minutes        the task as a whole class
10 minutes          focus on form – correction, teaching extra language needed
?? minutes          repeat the cycle as in task-based learning

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Anchor Point:4 Other fluency activities

Now I’d like to turn to other fluency activities, all of which will hopefully get students talking. I’ve divided them into sections. Here goes:

Ranking

A well-worn topic for ranking is the desert island challenge where students have to rank items in order of usefulness on a desert island, e.g. water, food, a boat, clothes, rope, a tent, a compass, etc. There are variations such as items to take on holiday, into space or to the Arctic. Pyramid discussions are a good way to organize this as you can get students to list their own order then they can try to persuade their partner. With arguments rehearsed they can then work as a four, and so on.

Information gap

This is a really basic idea and you probably do this without even thinking about it. In any pairwork activity there should be a gap between what one student knows and what their partner knows. You can achieve this by giving partial information to each student, e.g. half of a picture each, or a text with two different versions, or a spot the difference puzzle each. Opinion gaps are a special type of info gap but here the 'gap' is between one person’s opinion and another's. So any contentious subject should provoke a variety of opinions and thus provide gaps between one person’s viewpoint and another’s. Jigsaw tasks work on a similar basis. Each person – or group of students – has a different text. They read and digest, then recount their text to a person from the other group. It works well with listenings too, but it can get logistically complicated with the multiple tape players and headsets or rooms needed.

Q and A

Question and answer games are many and varied. They range from the EFL essential of “Find someone who…” where each person finds someone who… plays the guitar / rides a bike / has been to Italy, to full-blown student-devised questionnaires. Asking a question demands an answer, so in a simple way any Q and A activity prompts conversation. Equip your students with follow-on questions such as “Really, how well can you play?” or  “When did you learn to ride?”

Role-play

Any kind of assigning a role to students counts in this category. So if you tell them they’re in favour of the sea over the flute, that would count in my book. You’re telling them what to think or say in some way. Conventionally a role play gives a role or part to a student such as sister / father / shop assistant or whatever. It could be as simple as telling one member of each pair to be a customer who wants to buy stamps and the other to be a post office worker. Or it could be something that student improvise themselves, involving writing the dialogue, deciding who plays which part and finally performing it for the class.

Problem-solving

Giving students a task to do in pairs or groups should be a sure-fire way of achieving fluency. As with all fluency activities, the important stage is the setting-up. Once this is done then it should flow. Problems could range from following instructions and building a model out of lego or cuisenaire rods to working out a solution to a logic problem. Make sure students do in fact have to talk to each other to achieve the end result. Perhaps give some information to each student so that they have to pool this to find the solution. A good example of this type of task is ‘Detective Work’ in Hadfield’s Intermediate Communication Games.

Story-telling

This should be intrinsically interesting for students. Stories could range from anecdotes (short, personal accounts of an incident from real life) to long and meandering sagas using pictures or words as prompts (see ‘Sci-fi dominoes’ in Hadfield’s Intermediate Communication Games).

And finally, look in the books below for more ideas of fluency activities. You’ll soon get an idea of what works with your group. Perhaps they’re more into team games with points, or maybe they like co-operative games. Whatever the activity, think through the language they will need to complete it and include some kind of post-activity focus on form slot. Variety is important as anything can become dull if it’s done too often and is thus predictable. Vary the task, the seating arrangements, group size and materials used.

Good luck!

Maria Leedham, Oxford, UK

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Anchor Point:5References

Bygate, M. (1996) ‘Effects of task repetition: appraising the developing language of learners’ In Challenge and Change below.

Hadfield, J. (1990) Elementary / Intermediate / Advanced Communication Games, Nelson. These contain photocopiable activities so there is lots of chopping to do. But once you have them cut up you can use them again and maybe set up a resource bank with other teachers.

Klippel, F. (1984) Keep Talking, CUP. This is packed with good ideas for fluency activities and also has a good introduction with sound advice on how to organize an effective fluency class.

Skehan, P. (1996) ‘Second language acquisition research and task-based instruction’ In Challenge and Change below.

Willis, J. (1996) A Framework for Task Based Learning, Addison Wesley Longman Ltd. This is a very readable account of TBL and has useful advice on transcribing students, recording native speakers and devising your own tasks.

Willis, J. (1996) ‘A flexible framework for task-based learning’ In Challenge and Change below.

Willis, J. and Willis,D. (1996) (Eds.) Challenge and Change in Language Teaching, Macmillan Heinemann. Lots of good sections in here on the importance of repeating a task, focussing on form, etc.

Classroom management: classroom discipline

Author: Margot McCamley

Level: starter/beginner, advanced, elementary, pre-intermediate, intermediate, upper-intermediate Type: reference material

Advice and suggestions on getting students to behave well in class and using an appropriate level of discipline.

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How do we get students to behave in class? Usually not by telling them to behave, but using behaviour patterns that ensure they behave.

Let me explain. I teach 18 students aged from 11-15 in the one class, some at varying levels of language ability to others. This means there is not only a sociological divide but also a language level divide. So how do I get my students to behave? I use these strategies and they are ones that all teachers need to try at least once in their classroom to see which ones work for them.

First ask yourself some questions:

·         Have you set a code of behaviour in the classroom?

This should be set with the students, where possible so they know the consequences of their behaviour should it not be socially acceptable to the rest of the group or to you. I always have this code of behaviour on the board or on the wall on a big sheet of paper. Five or six key points are sufficient, e.g. I will work hard to learn the language. I sometimes just have to point to it to remind students of their decision, and this brings the student back on line... Also the teacher needs to add his/her code of behaviour too, what the teacher will do for the students, e.g. be patient, never yell, I will work hard to help you learn the language...etc.

·         Are the students really understanding you or are they missing most of what you are saying?

Very often bad behaviour patterns are because students do not understand what is being taught to them, and they find no purpose for the noise coming from the teacher. There is one way to demotivate students and that is for them to not understand what is really going on. Here is a clue to bad behaviour - 75% of bad behaviour is accredited to academic failure - in other words, they have missed vital clues in the learning process.Make sure your students are having fun. This does not mean games where students are over active. Fast moving games are not necessarily the answer to discipline. In fact they often exacerbate the problem.

·         What type of troublemaker are they?

Attention Seekers - do they show off to get the rest of the class laughing?

STRATEGY: Ignore minor behaviours but set a limit on what you call a minor infringement. Be FIRM and CONSISTENT; when behaviour is good, give attention to that behaviour - e.g. good, well done.

Power seekers - do they want to put one over you all the time?

STRATEGY: Don't argue or fight with the student; remain fair and firm about the behaviour; as 'the One-Minute Manager' said, catch them out doing something good.

Revenge seekers - act defiant, e.g. a student who won't move to another section of the class when you think his or her behaviour is not acceptable.

STRATEGY: Most of all, don't act hurt - students see that as a weakness because they have had a reaction; convince the student that he or she is liked - find the student doing something good and smile at and commend that good behaviour.

Withdrawn or depressed - gives up easily and then sits in silence.

STRATEGY: Ignore failures, but counsel regularly. When counselling, always, but always give good news first - e.g. I like what you did here, then counsel with the bad behaviour. Lastly, finish with some good news - how the behaviour can be addressed and then arrive at a solution.

Most of all be FAIR and CONSISTENT.

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Now some tips for the Teacher:

• Change students around

I have my bad behavers sit in the front of the class. This way I can move towards them more easily, maybe touch them lightly on the shoulder if they are getting out of hand and pause near them. Make eye contact as you leave.

• Use soft reprimands - Like the One-Minute Manager

Find time to praise the good work the student does. If the bad behaviour is minor - ignore whereever possible. Don't yell. Remain silent until the group settles down. If you have some students on-side, those who do know what is going on, they will settle the rest of the group down. Let them be the ones to say 'shush'. Sometimes I simply clap hands a couple of times and the group comes back on line. Then I speak softly, not with a loud voice. This has a calming effect on the whole class.

• Encourage even your worst student

When they are behaving well, catch them doing that. 'Well done'. 'Good work'. It is amazing how soon you get them on-side if they think you are finding them out doing good work. Counsel when you can and don’t make it always a bad behavioural thing. I often speak to a student after class and say how well I think they are doing, sometimes in front of their friends, because it motivates the rest of the group too.

• Never ball out a student out in class

Just at a convenient time, as you are passing the student say you want to see that student after class - quietly. It is amazing how the behaviour changes from that moment on. At the meeting, find out the cause of the behaviour. Explain that it is not helping the student to behave in this way, and explain the consequences of the behaviour - there is a written code which all the students agreed to at the beginning of the course - it should be ever present. And there should be a code of behaviour which the school has decided on - that persistent behaviour eventually means expulsion.

• Don't allow yelling at the teacher in class when the student knows something 

Miss, Miss Miss or Sir, Sir, Sir...and standing up and coming to the teacher all the time is another disruptive behaviour. It can be VERY noisy if all the students know the answer and they are yelling at you and you don't want a rush of students coming to you to show you their work.

They soon learn the discipline of putting their hand up when a response is needed or that you will look at their work at an appropriate time. This makes for a more productive classroom, and students feel great when they are chosen to answer and you feel better because you don't have a headache from the noise.

• Move around in the proximity of the student when the behaviour is persistent

Not in a disciplinary way, rather in the guise of helping them with the problem they have. Maybe they don't understand. Move towards them, see if you can help them, then when you have calmed the student, walk away with a smile and a well done.

A final message:

·         Be INSISTENT

·         Be CONSISTENT

·         Be PERSISTENT

·         But most of all be FAIR

Soon you will get to like your students and enjoy the class with them.

lassroom management: pair and group work in EFL/ ESL

Level: starter/beginner, advanced, elementary, pre-intermediate, intermediate, upper-intermediate Type: reference material

A discussion about using pair and group work in EFL/ESL classes.

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The modern English language teacher is spoilt for choice when it comes to selecting material for use in class. There are hundreds of excellent course-books on the market and a wealth of supplementary material. Many of these books will include interesting and motivating exercises and activities based on communicative principles. There is little doubt that activities such as information-gap, questionnaires, interviewing, mingling and so on will work well in the multilingual classroom where learners from diverse backgrounds are required to use English as the only means of communication. Such activities have become commonplace in classrooms in the English-speaking environment and they are widely used to good effect to promote fluency and to give contextualised practise of grammatical structures, functional exponents and items of vocabulary.

However, ESL classes in English-speaking countries represent just a small percentage of the total amount of English language teaching going on in the world at a given moment. Most L classes are monolingual and monocultural, i.e., EFL, and this has a considerable effect on the use of pair and group activities.

Firstly, and most obviously, the lack of a need to communicate in English means that any communication between learners in that language will seem artificial and arguably even unnecessary. Secondly, the fact that all the learners in the class share a common culture (and are often all from the same age group) will mean that there will often be a total lack of curiosity about what other class members do or think, thus making questionnaire-based activities superfluous. Thirdly, there is the paradox that the more interesting and motivating the activity is (and particularly if it involves a competitive element of some sort), the more likely the learners are to use the mother tongue in order to complete the task successfully or to finish first. Finally, the very fact that more effort is involved to communicate in a foreign language when the same task may be performed with much less effort in the mother tongue will also tend to ensure that very little English is used.

Taken as a whole these factors will probably convince many teachers that it is simply not worth bothering with pair and group work in monolingual classes at all. This, however, would be to exclude from one’s teaching a whole range of potentially motivating and useful activities and to deny learners the opportunity to communicate in English in class time with anyone but the teacher.

Simple mathematics will tell use that in a one-hour lesson with 20 learners, each learner will speak for just 90 seconds if the teacher speaks for half the lesson. In order to encourage learners in a monolingual class to participate in pair and group work, it might be worth asking them whether they regard speaking for just 3% of the lesson to be good value and point out that they can increase that percentage substantially if they try to use English in group activities. At first learners may find it strange to use English when communicating with their peers but this is, first and foremost, a question of habit and it is a gradual process. For the teacher to insist that English is used may well be counter-productive and may provoke active resistance. If the task is in English, on the other hand, and learners have to communicate with each other about the task, some English will inevitably be used. It may be very little at first but, as with any habit, it should increase noticeably as time goes by. Indeed, it is not unusual to hear more motivated learners in a monolingual situation communicating with each other in English outside the classroom.

If the benefits of using English to perform purposeful communicative tasks are clearly explained to the class and if the teacher is not excessively authoritarian in insisting that English be used, a modest and increasing success rate can be achieved. It is far too much to expect that all learners will immediately begin using English to communicate with their peers all the time. But, if at least some of the class use English some of the time, that should be regarded as a significant step on the road to promoting greater use of English in pair and group work in the monolingual classroom.

Classroom management: speaking correction techniques

Author: Simon Mumford and Steve Darn

Level: starter/beginner, advanced, elementary, pre-intermediate, intermediate, upper-intermediate Type: reference material

Suggestions of speaking correction techniques to use when teaching English.

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I want to know. What's the best way to correct students when they make a mistake, especially when they are speaking?
Posted: 30 May 2005 at 9:00pm

Introduction

Everyone makes mistakes, even speakers using their own language when they are hurried, ‘lost for words’, or forced into inappropriate language by a difficult or unusual situation. It is hardly surprising, then, that language learners make mistakes, given the difficulty of the task of comprehending, processing the content of the message and knowledge of the target language, and coming out with a response that is both grammatically correct and appropriate to the situation.

It is generally agreed that correction is part of the teaching/learning process, but that over-correction and poor correction techniques can be demotivating for the learner and may lead to a reluctance to try out new language or even to speak at all. Teachers need to make informed decisions about what, when and how to correct in order to help learners improve their speaking skills without damaging their confidence. The following are important points to consider:

• Mistakes and errors

Errors are produced as a result of the lack or misinterpretation of knowledge, which, in turn, may be a product of the learner’s stage of language development, or inadequate teaching or learning. Errors cannot be corrected and need to be dealt with by teaching or reteaching. Errors are often noticed in less-guided practice activities when the same error is made by a number of learners, leading the teacher to realize that something has gone wrong in earlier stages of the teaching/learning process. Mistakes, on the other hand, are products of the learner’s efforts to produce language despite prior knowledge. They may be due a variety of factors including over-enthusiasm, over-generalization of rules, interference from the mother tongue, and once the cause has been established, can be dealt with by a number of correction techniques.

• Accuracy and fluency

Mistakes are usually corrected immediately when the aim of the stage of the lesson is to promote accuracy, particularly during the drilling of the target language and during guided practice. Attention to mistakes in these stages improves the chances of correct use of language later, while mistakes made during less-guided practice often indicate that the teacher has not dealt effectively with mistakes at the accuracy stage. When the aim is fluency, however, less intrusive, ‘gentle’ or delayed correction techniques are required in order not to damage either the flow of the activity or the confidence of the learners.

• Interlanguage

In the process of acquiring the language, a learner may acquire forms of language that are in between their first language and their target language. This is their ‘interlanguage’, and is a product of incorrect application of rules, incomplete knowledge, and comparison between two (or more) languages. Interlanguage may seem completely logical and correct in the mind of the learner and may also be a part of a natural learning process where rules get more refined as more input is received. This leads to the belief that mistakes are a healthy part of language learning and should not be dealt with too severely. However, if learners are not corrected, mistakes in their interlanguage may ‘fossilise’ and become permanent.

• Good learners

Oddly, ‘good’ learners often make more mistakes than others. This tends to be because they have more confidence, produce more language and are highly motivated to speak. Good learners are also ‘hypothesis testers’ in that that they can formulate and try out rules of their own, and ‘risk takers’ in that they are prepared to ‘have a go’. These learners need to be encouraged, and are often capable of self-correction.

Teachers need to consider the above, get to know their learners and their learning backgrounds, develop an attitude to correction and be equipped with a variety of correction techniques which are appropriate to a variety of learner types and learning situations. Bearing this in mind, we suggest some activities that teachers might like to try in their classrooms.

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Part 1: While-speaking correction

Correction symbols
Some teachers use prompts for correction while speaking. Some well-known examples are:

·         Make a ‘T’ with fingers to illustrate missing ‘the’.

·         Show a small word missing by holding thumb and forefinger close together.

·         Cross hands over to show wrong word order.

To these I would like to add some more prompts, using sounds, gestures and puns:

·         Pull ear to show irregular past tense: ‘ear’ sounds the same as the first syllable in ‘irregular’.

·         ‘With’ and ‘by’ e.g. with car - teacher waves to signal ‘bye’, which sounds the same as ‘by’.

·         Confusion of auxiliary e.g. I aren’t like swimming - sing ‘Do be do be do’ (Strangers in the night - Frank Sinatra).

·         Missing ‘ing’ e.g. I am wait for a bus - T says ‘(t)ing’ like a bell ringing.

·         Unnecessary ‘to’ e.g. I must to go - draw -2 (minus t(w)o) on the board in the air.

·         Where would is used wrongly, e.g. in conditionals, tap on ‘wood’ to show that ‘would’ is wrong.

·         Wrong present tense e.g. simple vs. continuous: Use a circling hand motion to prompt continuous, use open arms to show wide, e.g. general time.

·         Buzz like a bee to show missing verb ‘be’ e.g. I going.

·         Student says For going instead of to go: Hold up four fingers and then cover two of them to show ‘for’ (4) should be ‘to’ (2).

·         Make a scissors motion with fingers to cut out unnecessary words .e.g. …which I like it.

·         I don’t want no tea - make two minus symbols with your fingers, then cross them to make a plus to show two negatives make a positive in English.

·         On/in - make an ‘o’ with your finger/thumb and change it to ‘I’ straight finger, or vice versa (if appropriate to your culture!).

·         Adjective used instead of adverb. E.g. He walked slow - make an L shape with your right index finger and thumb. This looks like both ‘l’ and ‘y’, so signifies ‘ly’. Close the thumb and finger to show that the ‘ly’ is unnecessary, i.e. adv. > adj, and open to change adj. > adv.

You could invent own symbols. While students need to learn them, which may take time, it brings humour into the sometimes serious task of correction and avoids the need for words. Once the students have learnt the symbols, there is also potential for peer correction.

Correction table
Draw a table on the board. While students are talking, point to the type of mistake, giving students a chance to self-correct. You could ask for volunteers to speak, e.g. a pair. Afterwards students could try it in groups, with two speaking and one listening and pointing. A table could look like this:

Preposition wrong / missing	Wrong tense, e.g. simple / continuous	Article a / the missing / wrong	Phonology, sounds e.g. silent letters	Word stress	Wrong infinitive form, e.g. Let him to go.
Simple present, 3rd person -s, e.g. He go. They goes.	Word order, e.g. I speak well English.	Wrong word	Wrong form, e.g. adverb / adjective	Wrong pronoun, he/she, we/us	Irregular past tense, e.g. swimmed

Correction drill
Choose a confident student who will not mind having mistakes corrected. Explain that you are going to correct him as he speaks, and that the purpose behind this is not to humiliate, but to help. The student should speak, e.g. tell a story about himself. You repeat each sentence. If there are mistakes, you repeat the sentence correctly and the rest of the class does the same after you. The rationale is 1) students get to hear how they should sound, 2) the rest of the class is involved, and they listen to the original and the teacher’s improvement. 3) By using intonation to show interest, approval, disapproval, and surprise in a light-hearted way, which can be echoed by the class, you focus on meaning as well as form. Example:

·         S1: I stood up late.

·         T: Oh you got up late! (disapproving)

·         SS: You got up late! (disapproving)

·         S1: I got up late, then I eat big breakfast.

·         T: You had a big breakfast. (amused)

·         SS: You had a big breakfast. (amused) etc.

·         S1: Yes, I had a big breakfast then I went at the park.

Teacher’s shadow
Put students in groups for conversation. Choose one student to shadow you while you walk around, monitoring. When you hear a mistake, correct it and replace the student who made it with your shadow, so that you have new shadow. Continue until you have had a number of different shadows. Shadows can help you listen for mistakes, too. The aims are: to give the students a teacher’s view of the class, to make students aware of mistakes. Also it should show it's not only weak students who make mistakes. As we noted in the introduction, ‘good’ students who speak more and try to use more complex language make mistakes, so stress that being a shadow is not a punishment.

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Part 2: Post-speaking correction

Speaking graph
Ask for a pair of volunteers to speak on a certain subject. While they speak, draw a line on a graph which represents the students’ level of speaking quality. When mistakes are made the line goes down. When the students are speaking well, it goes up. Make a note of the positive things as well as the mistakes. Here’s an example of a feedback commentary.

After a slow start, this conversation picks up. The teacher notes the correct use of ‘used to’. However a tense mistake is made. This is followed by a minor mistake, a missing preposition. Then there is a fluent stage with both students speaking well. Unfortunately one student uses a wrong word. However, contractions are well used. A mispronunciation towards the end is the only slight problem in the last stages.

To give students encouragement, note that most of the time they are above the line of clear communication, only a couple of mistakes cause confusion for the listener, while other mistakes do not interfere with comprehension. Of course, not every mistake needs to be noted; in fact as the purpose is to encourage, over-correction would be counter-productive. Note: if writing on the board distracts students, do it on paper and transfer to the board when they have finished.

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Part 3: Students look at their own mistakes

Two speaking, one secretary
Getting students to focus on each other’s mistakes can be useful, if done tactfully and the reasons explained (it is sometimes easier to see other people’s mistakes other than your own.) While two students speak, a third makes notes of anything that he or she thinks may be wrong. Afterwards the three students can discuss it.

Manual chat
Instead of speaking to each other, students quickly pass pieces of paper back and forward with a written conversation in groups, a bit like chatting on the Internet. This has the advantage of being similar to spoken conversation, but leaving a written record that can be analyzed by students themselves.

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Part 4: Written correction exercises

Written correction exercises can raise awareness of errors made in speaking, and can be chosen to reflect students’ common mistakes.

Booing and cheering correction
Write six or so sentences on the board, some of which should contain mistakes. Students locate the mistakes as follows: As you point to each sentence, get the class to cheer or boo, according to whether they think it is correct or not. Put a cross next to the sentences the class thinks are incorrect. Point at these word by word until the mistake is located, again by booing and cheering.

Rule and mistake sentences
To help students remember not to make mistakes, write sentences which both give and break the rules. Try getting students to correct these examples:

1. When you writing a present continuous sentence, always include the verb ‘to be’ (When you are writing…)
2. For making sentences expressing purpose, use an infinitive.
3. You know how to use an auxiliary verb in present tense questions?
4. If I you will tell me how to use ‘if’ with present, I will not make a mistake.
5. I forgetted that some past tense verbs are irregular.
6. Teachers should not to let students use unnecessary words.
7. When use an adverb clause, don’t forget to use a participle.
8. Use a preposition when you listen the radio, don’t when you watch to the TV.
9. He’s never used a past time clause with present perfect until last week.
10. Use ‘a’ the first time you introduce a word, but use ‘the’ for a same word later.

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Conclusion: Turning a blind eye

In the introduction we noted that while correction was necessary to prevent fossilization, over-correction could be demotivating. This means that teachers need to be selective in correction. Some students may notice that some mistakes are not being corrected. Here’s an activity you can use to explain this.

Record students’ mistakes and write them on the board, which you divide into two. Write on the right side if they are serious, i.e. interfere with communication, and on the left side if they are not. Ask students to help you decide. When finished, tell students that ‘to turn a blind eye’ means to ignore something wrong, and this is usually done where to do something would be worse than to do nothing. The original expression is reputed to come from Admiral Nelson, who ignored a signal to retreat, by ‘looking’ at it with his blind eye, and then won the battle. Like battles, speaking a foreign language is a risky business, and in the interests of encouragement, mistakes are sometimes overlooked. Ask your students to cover their left eyes and concentrate on the mistakes on the right.

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Simon Mumford teaches at the University of Economics, Izmir Turkey. He also is an oral examiner, trainer and workshop organizer for the British Council in Izmir. He is especially interested in the application of creative thinking to classroom activity design.

Steve Darn has lived and taught in Turkey for over 20 years, and is currently a teacher and trainer in the School of Foreign Languages at Izmir University of Economics. He also trains teachers and trainers for the British Council in Turkey and is a tutor and assessor for Cambridge ESOL Teaching Awards. He is a regular contributor to a number of ELT
magazines.

Classroom management: teaching mixed-ability classes

Author: Tim Bowen

Level: starter/beginner, advanced, elementary, pre-intermediate, intermediate, upper-intermediate Type: reference material

Advice and suggestions for teaching English to mixed-ability classes.

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Romina Trossero in Argentina wrote into our Grammar Help section with the
following problem:

“I’d like to get some information about mixed ability English language classes and some activities to use with a class in which there are two levels of English.”

This is Tim Bowen's response:

This is a very common problem. Most, if not all, language classes contain students of mixed abilities. This happens for a number of reasons, but mainly because of different learning styles, different learning speeds, variations in motivation and, very frequently, as a result of logistic decisions. Very often the teacher is faced with a class with two or more distinct levels of ability and has to tackle the problem of how to meet the needs of everyone in the class. Naturally, this is not an easy problem to solve and it would be wrong to suggest that there are any simple solutions. A fundamental step, however, is to talk to the class about the situation and to present it to them as a normal situation and one that the class as a whole has to deal with. This is probably best done in the mother tongue of the students. As most of the solutions to the problem depend on cooperation between the members of the class, it is essential to stress the need for teamwork and for the class to use English whenever possible in classroom communication.

The use of pair and group work is essential if you are to involve all the members of the class. A fundamental technique here is the use of questionnaires and interviews. By pairing off weaker and stronger students and involving both in the preparation and implementation of the questionnaire you should ensure maximum participation of all the students. You can then get the weaker students to interview the stronger ones and vice-versa. Of course, this may be frustrating for the stronger ones, but if they are able to see their role as that of “helper” or even mentor, it may also have a positive effect.

A second area of activity that can be productive in mixed ability classes is project work. Again, this can work successfully using mixed groups where the stronger help the weaker, but another approach is to form groups that are at approximately the same level and assign different tasks that are appropriate to the level of each group. By adjusting the complexity of the task, you can ensure that each group has a task that it can carry out successfully, thereby providing the correct level of challenge for the higher level students and not demotivating the weaker ones.

A third area is that of homework. If you set the whole class the same homework task irrespective of level, then you will have to expect very mixed results. As with progress tests, the purpose of homework should be to consolidate class work. To this end, giving weaker students less demanding tasks can help both to motivate them and to give them further practice in areas of the language which they have not yet mastered. Assigning more challenging tasks to the stronger students in the group should ensure that they remain motivated and continue to make progress. It is more work for the teacher but, ultimately, it should produce results.

Choral drilling can be an effective way of involving weaker or shy students. If applied judiciously (in other words not all the time), it can give excellent practice in rhythm and intonation, as well as reinforcing word order and grammatical structure.

Finally, be diplomatic in your questioning techniques. Try to avoid putting weaker students “on the spot” by nominating them to be the first to answer a question in open class. Instead, try to encourage a culture of attentive listening in the classroom so that you ask a stronger student first and then ask a weaker student to repeat the answer. It may take time but, once this style of interaction becomes habitual, it can be very productive in terms of class dynamics.

Classroom management: Team English for large classes

Author: Marguerite MacDonald, Zena Thiravithul, Swinburne Tummasiri and Laem Chabang

Level: starter/beginner, advanced, elementary, pre-intermediate, intermediate, upper-intermediate Type: reference material

Advice on teaching English to large groups of students.

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Team English is a technique for teaching communicative language in large classes. We have used this technique with middle and high school students, as well as in workshops.

Conceptually, Team English can be used with any large group of students, from kindergarteners to business executives. It is particularly effective with teenagers, who are often hard to manage in crowded classes of forty, fifty, or even more students. Team English uses team and member identification through colors and numbers while at the same time incorporating principles of cooperative learning, an approach to education in which students work together to achieve a common objective. As a result, Team English provides an organization and management system that allows students to interact in communicative activities while preventing the chaos often resulting from attempts to use groups in large classes.

An important component of Team English is the ability to identify teams and individual members quickly and easily. Each team has a designated color. Each student wears the team color and a team number. When we worked with middle and high school classes, we had six colors. In a recent workshop for TESOL educators we used eight colors. Colors can be personalized further by using them in a team name. Once students are comfortable working together, they can choose names like the “yellow tigers” or “red dragons.”

To display the team color, you can have students wear a sports sash, jersey, head band, or other identifier that can easily be seen from a distance. We use sports pinnies made of very lightweight nylon. If you plan to carry these from class to class, weight is an important factor, since you will be transporting many of them. Even though it was an investment for us to purchase the pinnies, we use them repeatedly and thus look at them as tools of the trade. A less expensive solution is to take light-weight plastic folders and cut them in half at the fold. You then punch one hole in each corner of one short side of both pieces. Next you join these pieces with ribbon so that they can be worn as a bib, front and back. Students can be responsible for carrying these with their other school materials.

Numbers identify each member of the team. In teams of six students, numbers 1-6 are used; if there are nine team members, students are numbered 1-9, and so forth. On the pinnies we use, we have a large number centered near the neckline on both the front and back of the garment. This makes it easy for us to see the number, even if the students slide down in their seats or have their backs to us. You can glue or iron on numbers, or create your own by using a large-width permanent marker. The important thing to remember is that the numbers need to be large enough and high enough to be seen from a distance when students are seated at their desks.

For each activity, you form pairs or groups appropriate for that activity. With a team of nine members, there are 28 different combinations of triads alone. In effect, each team represents a small class, which allows students to develop team loyalty while still interacting with a variety of classmates. To encourage peer mentoring, you can form pairs and groups of mixed higher and lower abilities. The students with stronger leadership and English skills can be the group leaders. They then take on a mentoring role for the other students. As other team members develop these skills, they too can assume leadership roles. Within the group, you can assign each student a different responsibility, based on that student’s ability. At times, you may also want to form more homogeneous groups within the team. Each group can do a different activity, again depending on ability. You can then easily assist the group most needing individual attention within each team.

To begin implementing Team English, you need to decide on the number of teams, based on the number of students in your class, so that the class will be divided into roughly equal numbers of from six to 12 students. For example, in our classes of approximately 54 middle or high school students we created six teams of nine students. For a recent workshop of almost 100 participants, we had eight teams of 12 students. If necessary, some teams will have an additional student or be one student short. Class absences will likewise create teams of different numbers. When a team has an additional member, that member shares responsibilities with others of equal ability on the team. If the team is short one or more members, designated students of equal ability from the same team take over the responsibilities of the missing players.

Before assigning students to the teams, you should choose a captain for each team by selecting students recognized for their leadership ability as well as their English skills. You can then distribute the remaining students randomly to the teams or assign them by ability. In the latter case, after identifying the captains, you rank the remaining students from high to low in English ability. Starting at the top of the ranking, you distribute one student to each team. After the first round, you then distribute one student from the bottom of the list. You alternate rounds in this way until you have placed all students on a team. Should you anticipate conflicts among students, you can switch these students to other teams before you begin. Likewise, if you see an imbalance among the teams, you can move students until all teams seem roughly equal in ability.

Once you have designated the number of players on a team, you will need to assign each student a number. If the students are distributed by ability, it is a good idea to number the students by ability consistently across teams. For example, in teams of nine, the lower level ability students could be given numbers 2, 6, 7; the mid range 3, 5, 9; and the higher level 1 (usually the captain), 4, 8. It is better not to order students’ ability sequentially from 1-9 so as not to stigmatize any specific student. By knowing which students correspond to specific levels of ability, you can control for homogeneity or heterogeneity within pairs or groups. Using the example above, for a team of nine you could have heterogeneous triads of #1/#2/#3, #4/#5/#6, and #7/#8/#9, as well as other combinations. To form homogeneous triads, you would group #2/#6/#7, #3/#5/#9, and #1/#4/#8. While some people think of numbers as impersonal, team numbers take on a more meaningful affiliation, as they do in sports. In addition, they help you learn your students’ names because you can associate the name with the student’s team color and number.

To organize the teams within the classroom, you need to create a floor plan of the desks. You can then block off sections of the classroom so that team members are able to work with each other within their respective section. We have provided a floor plan that was used for a class of 54 middle school students [ See insert #2 ]. Students can move within that block as activities dictate. You do not need to require each student to sit at a specific desk, since you can easily identify students by their team color and number. However, when introducing Team English, you may want to assign seats for the first few days, placing the captains in a central position so they are close to all their team members.

When using Team English for the first time, you can hand out the team identifier with its number to the relevant student, ask the captains to do so, or have the students create their own identifier, as described earlier, with the color and number that you have designated. For the first time, we place the pinnie on the desk where we want the specific student to sit. We then post a list of the name and number of each team member. From then on, students pick up their pinnie from their team captain at the beginning of each class. When the teams are in place for the first time, you can begin with a Total Physical Response (TPR) activity, as we do. TPR uses commands to which the students respond, thus reinforcing their team and individual identity. First we have teams respond to commands, for instance, “Yellow stand up,” or “Blue waive your hands.” Next we use the same commands with numbers so that the appropriate member from every team responds, such as, “All fives stand up,” or All threes waive your hands.” Finally, we call on individual students, for example, “Red five stand up,” or “Green three waive your hands.”

After the warm-up activity and any other activities required to introduce concepts of team cooperation and responsibility, you form groups within the team, appropriate to the specific activity you plan to use. Pairs or groups of three work particularly well in classes where desks are packed so close together that it is physically difficult to form larger groups. Also, pairs or triads allow easy viewing of materials if each group has only one copy.

It is easy to configure the pairs or groups for the whole class because one set of numbers applies to all teams. For example, in teams of six students, you can pair #1/#2, #3/#4, and #5/#6 or just as easily change the pairing to #1/#4, #2/#5, and #3/#6, and so forth. In the same way, you can form triads #1/#2/#3 and #4/#5/#6, or #1/#3/#5 and #2/#4/#6, among several other combinations. We assign letters to the pairs and groups so that we can call on groups within teams. As in the example above, for one activity Group A may be #1/#2/#3 and Group B, #4/#5/#6 but for another activity you may wish to configure the members of the team differently. Once groups have been formed, we sometimes do TPR exercises, thereby checking that students are in the correct group and reinforcing their group cooperation.

In our most recent workshop, we grouped participants randomly, designating #1 as the team captain, responsible for checking that all groups were working together successfully. The team captain also had to collect the pinnies at the end of the session. Within each team, we formed four triads by designating them on the handout: Group A #1/#2/#3; Group B #4/#5/#6; Group C #7/#8/#9; and Group D #10/#11/#12. We also included the responsibilities of each member within the group. Team members #1, #4, #7, and #10 were to coordinate their respective group’s activities, making sure that all members of the group contributed to the effort. Team members #2, #5, #8, and #11 had to keep their group on task, helping the members to focus. Finally, team members #3, #6, #9, and #12 were responsible for encouraging their group’s members, congratulating them on their successes, assuring them that they could do the tasks, and supporting them when they were having difficulty.

For the groups in this workshop we used an activity from the Reward Elementary Resource Pack by Sue Kay. We have found that the activities in this and other resource packs in the series work particularly well for Team English. All are communicative and most are appropriate for pairs and triads. The activity we chose was “Photo Album” from Unit 6 [see insert #3 box below ]. There are nine pictures resembling photographs, to be cut from the reproducible page. We made 24 copies of the page then cut the pictures out, placing each set of nine pictures in an envelope. Within the teams, each group received one set of pictures.

Classroom management: the role of correction in English teaching

Author: Lindsay Clandfield and Duncan Foord

Level: starter/beginner, advanced, elementary, pre-intermediate, intermediate, upper-intermediate Type: reference material

An article discussing the role of correction in English language teaching.

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Correction slots: in principle and practice

Introduction

A lot of time and effort is spent on training courses and beyond in encouraging teachers to consider whether immediate or later correction of student errors during oral work is appropriate. There are a variety of good methods and techniques suggested for correcting students' errors on the spot (see references below).

Our aim here is to consider what benefits correction of any kind might have for learners, as well as to present some ideas for conducting later correction (correction slots). We have included a sample lesson plan with two of these ideas incorporated into it.

Why correct learners?

Look at these statements about correction of students' oral work. What do you think?

• Advanced students need loads of correction, beginners hardly any. When you start to learn a language you need to be able to communicate imperfectly in lots of situations, not perfectly in a few. The teacher's job is to support learners as they blunder through a range of communicative scenarios, not badger them because they forget the third person -s. With advanced learners the opposite is usually the case.
• The jury is out on the question of whether correcting students, however you do it, has any positive effect on their learning. There is some evidence, though, that time spent on correcting learners may be wasted.

Research into Second Language Acquisition has suggested that it may be that some language forms can be acquired more quickly through being given special attention while others may be acquired in the learners' own time, regardless of teacher attention. This helps explain, for example, why intermediate learners usually omit third person -s just like beginners, but often form questions with do correctly, unlike beginners.

• There is little point correcting learners if they don’t have a fairly immediate opportunity to redo whatever they were doing and get it right.

Learners need the opportunity for a proper rerun of the communication scenario in which they made the error, if they are to have any chance of integrating the correct form into their English. Whether the error was teacher-corrected, peer-corrected or self-corrected in the first place is of relatively minor importance.

• Lots of learners and teachers think correction is important.

Is this because it helps them to learn and teach or helps them to feel like learners and teachers?

• The problem with some learners is they don’t make enough mistakes.

Accurate but minimal contributions in speaking activities are unlikely to benefit learning as much as inaccurate but extended participation. Learners can be hampered by their own inhibitions and attitudes to accuracy and errors, the teacher’s attitude and behaviour (conscious or unconscious) to accuracy and errors or the restricted nature of the activities proposed by the teacher.

• Teachers spend too much time focussing on what students do wrong at the expense of helping them to get things right.

When giving feedback to learners on their performance in speaking English, the emphasis for the teacher should be to discover what learners didn’t say and help them say that, rather than pick the bones out of what they did say. This requires the use of activities which stretch learners appropriately and the teacher listening to what learners aren’t saying. That’s difficult.

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Correction slot pro-forma

Here is a sample correction slot pro-forma which has been filled in with some notes that a teacher took during a fluency activity for a pre-intermediate class of Spanish students:

Grammar/ vocab	Pronunciation	L1	#
I go always to cinema She have got a cat… Does she can swim? Swimming bath my fathers	“Comfortable” “Bag”– said “Back” intonation very flat (repeat some phrases with more pitch range)	Bodega Ocio Yo que sé	I don't ever see my sister Have you seen Minority Report? Good pronunciation of AMAZING

Why use this pro-forma?

1.    It helps teacher and students identify errors.

2.    It helps you as a teacher to listen and give balanced feedback.

And how to use it ?

1.    It has been divided into four sections. The first two, Grammar/Vocabulary and Pronunciation, are pretty evident and are what teachers look out for as 'mistakes' in most cases.

2.    The third slot, L1, means the words that students used in their own language during the exercise. We believe that in a fluency-based activity, if a student can’t find the right word in English, they should say it in their own language so as not to impede the flow. An attentive teacher (who also knows her students' L1) will make a quick note of it and bring it up later, eliciting the translation from the class. If you are teaching a multi-lingual class, you can still use this column. You don’t have to know the translations. You can prompt the learners to come up with those.

3.    The '#' column reminds us to include successful language in feedback. Too often in correction slots the emphasis is on what went wrong. Here the teacher can write down examples of good things that happened. This is especially true if the teacher notices that the students are using a recently taught structure or lexical item, or if they have pronounced something correctly that they had trouble with before.

Other suggestions

1.    You can copy your filled-in version and hand it out to groups of students to save writing on the whiteboard. Or simply use it to help you note down language in an organized way.

2.    You can fill out separate sheets for each group of students as you listen or even for each individual student (this would obviously work best with very small classes!). You can pass them round, have students correct their own, each others, whatever.

3.    The advantage of using a set form is that by doing this, you keep an ongoing record of mistakes that can be stored and exploited for revision lessons, tests or as a filler for the end of a class.

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How to conduct the correction slot

So now you are using a correction slot. Here are some ideas on how to vary it and make it more effective and memorable for your learners!

1. Rehashing
Write learners' errors on the whiteboard or OHP in the usual way. Then ask learners to rehash or summarize the communication using the errors on the board as prompts. For example, learners have been comparing two cities and the teacher has noted down and written mistakes on the board. Students have discussed and corrected the mistakes, so we now have correct vocabulary items and phrases on the board. The teacher then asks a student to report some of the points made, using the bits of language on the board as prompts. This can be done together as a group or in pairs or using both formats. This activity helps learners to reinforce corrected language (vocabulary, grammar, pronunciation).

2. The Correction Sandwich
This is a correction slot done in the middle of a communication activity. As with rehashing the advantage is that students actually have a chance to put feedback on their performance immediately into practice. It works particularly well with communication activities that have a rotating element and natural breaks, such as the job interview where a candidate has several interviews, or advice giving, where a student seeks advice on a problem from several other students. (see sample lesson plan). It can work just as well as a blatant interruption though. The teacher can stop a discussion activity, conduct a correction slot and then allow students to continue the discussion. An important advantage of the sandwich is you don’t end the lesson on a downer (accuracy work) but on communication, focusing on what students said and found out in the activity.

3. Grammar gap fill
Teacher writes up some incorrect (and correct) sentences she hears in the speaking activity and deletes a word or words from each one. Students have to fill the gaps. This works particularly well with prepositions.

4. Vocabulary extension
Write some headings on the board relating to lexical areas from the communication activity. If students have been comparing two cities the headings could be adjectives to describe a city, city facilities, climate for example. Learners make lists under each heading of words and expressions they used and heard used during the activity. Then ask students to add three items to each list, using a bilingual dictionary or the teacher as a resource. Teacher monitors and conducts collective feedback as necessary. The idea here is that not only do learners get their English polished but also extended.

5. Getting learners more involved in correcting each other
Students can take on the teachers role and be responsible for listening and noting down mistakes. They can use a pro forma such as the one included with this article. This can be especially useful when there is an odd number for pairwork or a role play activity. Feedback can be done firstly in small groups, where the student gives feedback to the peers he has been listening to, and then as a whole class to deal with unresolved difficulties.

6. Zero correction
Instead of having a correction slot, the teacher simply uses the errors she has noted down as the basis for language work in future classes.

Sample lesson plan
Still unsure? Try this lesson plan at the bottom of the page which incorporates two correction slot ideas.

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 Prepared by SRS...