Teaching English as a Foreign Language for Dummies (19 page)

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Nodding:
When you do this, people want to continue speaking to you.

They know that you’re listening and interested. In this case of students, they know that they’re doing well and that real communication is taking place because you understand. When they make an error, a confused or quizzical expression is less off-putting than shaking your head.

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Hums:
In English
hmmm
can mean yes, no, I’m not sure or score of other things. It’s a good way to show your opinion unobtrusively.

You can take it a step further by humming a whole sentence to demonstrate the right intonation.

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Pointing to clues:
If you have charts and instructional posters up in your classroom, you can point to the one that indicates the nature of the student’s problem. For example, if you have a verb table up, point to the past participle column when your student says ‘He had often sang’.

Gestures aren’t universal so students learn the body language of English speakers by watching you.

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Leading to Self Correction

Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed
him for a lifetime.

— Chinese proverb

According to the proverb, there’s wisdom in allowing people to fend for themselves once you explain how. This works in TEFL too. Students remember the answers they work out for themselves better than the ones you tell them explicitly. So if you always say ‘not
x
but
y
’ your students may lack the skills to correct themselves when you aren’t there.

After trying to help students correct themselves, and if they still don’t get it, tell them the answer and make sure that they understand any principal involved. It becomes exasperating if the correction process is drawn out for too long a time.

Progressing by prompting

Of course you can’t always wait for students to fathom things all by themselves, so instead you give them clues and prompts to help them get there. In addition to the largely non-verbal techniques in the previous section, you can also help students in these ways:

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Tell the student which part of speech or tense they need. For example:

• I came in the bus: Preposition.

• I am here since 2008: Change the tense with ‘since’.

• I am eating many bread: Uncountable or countable.

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Elicit the correct language by asking leading questions.

• Student: I told the host that I didn’t like tomatoes because they’re disgusting.

• Teacher: People have different likes and dislikes, don’t they? Lots of people love tomatoes. Can you tell me an expression that’s quite polite but means you don’t like something?

• Student: Is it
not nice?

• Teacher: That’s not quite right. I’m thinking of an expression that means it’s OK but not good for me.

• Student: Is it
not my cup of tea
?

• Teacher: Well done! Could you repeat your sentence now please?

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Examining echoing

A tendency for some teachers is to just say the correct version of what the student wanted to say, but this isn’t usually an effective correction technique.

Giulia has pronunciation difficulties:

Giulia: I leave in Hackney.

Teacher: You
live
in Hackney.

Giulia: Yes, I leave in Hackney.

Clearly Giulia doesn’t even realise that a correction has taken place. She can’t actually hear the difference between ‘live’ and ‘leave’ because the distinction between long and short vowel sounds doesn’t exist in her language. Unless the teacher makes her focus on the error, Giulia’s oblivious to it. She hears it as an echo with no particular connection to an error and she’ll probably repeat the mistake next time. The teacher needs to recognise that Giulia needs more help to sort out the different sounds by using the phonology of the words and writing the two sounds on the board. In this case /i/ and /i/.

Now she can both see and hear the difference. At the very least it’s better to say, ‘Not leave but live’ and ask her to repeat.

Encouraging Peer Correction

Peer correction
is asking students in the class to correct each other’s errors.

This very practical technique has several benefits:

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It reduces the pressure on the student who made the mistake, especially if the teacher’s attempts to prompt self-correction are unsuccessful.

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The other students are involved in what’s happening rather than just observing.

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The teacher can tell how widespread the problem is.

You can make use of various techniques in employing peer correction:

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Put the error on the board.
Monitor silent work, pair or group activities and make a note of the errors. Then, during the feedback session, you can put the error up on the board.

It’s considerate to conceal the identity of the student who got it wrong, so tweak the sentence a bit in order not to give it away. Then consult the class and ask what’s wrong with the sentence on the board.

Some students have visual memories and may recall the error rather than the correct version. It’s important to cross the wrong version out and put the correct word on the board.

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Part II: Putting Your Lesson Together

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Go round the class asking each student to say a word that some students are pronouncing incorrectly.
If one student gets it wrong, ask another student who did well to say it again, and then ask the student who got it wrong to have another go.

Watch the faces of the other students when one student is speaking. If you see a frown or grimace on a classmate’s face when a student makes an error, this is the ideal person to choose for peer correction. At a convenient moment you can ask: Hideki, you were listening carefully. Do you agree with Noako’s answer?

Make sure that students offer correction in English. Sometimes they think that their friend understands better if they just translate. At least you can train the students to say something like: ‘How do you say . . . in our language please?’

Scheduling Class Feedback

The class feedback session is when teachers usually address errors and give praise, so it’s really important to schedule time for this in your lesson plan. (I talk about lesson plans in Chapter 4.) During this part of the lesson you can highlight areas where students got things wrong and deal with the problems by briefly re-teaching a pertinent point or by prompting self and peer correction. Feedback involves the whole class offering suggestions or listening.

A lack of feedback leaves students wondering whether or not they were successful or actually overconfident.

You can carry out class feedback at various times:

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At the end of an activity:
Immediately after the students finish an activity, you can round things up with a review, praise and correction session. Use this as an opportunity to weed out any emerging problems in using the target language before you begin the next activity.

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At the end of the lesson:
Students may be making significant errors not related to the topic of the day that still require attention. Handling this at the end of the lesson prevents going off on a tangent to the detriment of your lesson plan.

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After written homework:
When you’ve completed the delightful task of marking all your students’ written work, make a note of recurring errors and have a dedicated feedback session about them. If several students have the same problems, it may indicate that something got left out when you taught that point.

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At the end of the week:
Repetition is a great way to remember things, so make a note of the errors that came up during the week and have a Friday review. This should help you to assess whether the students really got the point.

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Wielding Your Red Pen

Before I say anything about correcting written work, let me address the red pen debate. There are those who believe that the colour red is far too aggres-sive and confrontational to be used for marking. Others say it is the only colour that really stands out and that other ‘friendlier’ colours such as green and purple should represent opinions not correction. You have to make up your own mind about the colour of ink you choose, keeping in mind what is appropriate in the local culture.

Chinese students take offence if you write their names in red. They consider it rude, unlucky or both.

Marking with correction codes

Most teachers use a correction code when they mark written work so that the student can do some self-correction. You can devise your own symbols but Table 7-1 shows some possibilities.

Table 7-1

Correction Codes

Mark

Error Indicated

/\

A word is missing

/

Start a new sentence

//

Start a new paragraph

Gr

Grammar error

Sp

Spelling error

P

Punctuation error

Art

Error with articles (a, an, the)

c/unc

Countable/uncountable error (you can use a/an before countable nouns but never before uncountable noun
)

Wo

Wrong word order

Ww

Wrong word

Wt

Wrong tense

Wf

Wrong form

Irreg

Irregular verb

?

Unclear

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You may not want to highlight every error, as this may leave a piece of writing that reads well overall covered in disconcerting marks.

Many teachers gradually wean their students off the code in stages:

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Put a symbol next to the error

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Put symbols in the margin only for each line

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Give an overall assessment without symbols

The advantage of doing this is that the students gradually become more independent and aware of the need to edit their own work. During this process the teacher presents several compositions by other students so that the whole class can practise editing together.

If your students are comfortable with it, you can encourage peer correction of written work too.

Choosing written errors to work with

As it isn’t usually motivating to correct everything in an extended piece of writing, you need to give some thought to which points are worth dealing with and which aren’t.

Written work includes several areas that may need correction. These include:

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Style
. This covers the right degree of formality and the presentation of the work.

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Grammar
.

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Vocabulary
.

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Cohesion.
There needs to be a linking of ideas with appropriate words such as
because, therefore
and
after that
.

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Task completion
. Consider whether the piece of writing has really ful-filled the task that you set.At the top of the list of mistakes to correct, many teachers put style. Whenever students write they should have a reader in mind and reflect this in the degree of formality and the presentation. Take the two pieces of writing in Figure 7-1 for example.

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111

Dear Caroline,

Thank you for your invitation to the party, However, I regret to inform you that I will be unable
to attend due to unforeseen circumstances.

Yours sincerely

Ivanete

Allo Caroline,

Figure 7-1:

Tank you for the invitation to your house for party. Sorry but is not good this day for me
Which

because I working. I Coming next time promis.

note would

you like to

Kisses

receive if

you were

Ivanete

Caroline?

The first note doesn’t contain any particular errors, but it’s inappropriate for the situation. However, the second version has several inaccuracies but it also displays real warmth because of the style. I suspect that Caroline would prefer to receive the second version.

So, when your students write, train them to use appropriate layout, style and register (degree of formality). I talk about appropriate style and register in Chapter 11.

When you correct grammar, try not to get too distracted from the purpose of the text. It’s best to focus on expressions that students are likely to use repeatedly.

So, for example, if your class is preparing for higher education, the students probably need to grasp the use of passive sentences in general because these are common to academic writing. If a student wrote: ‘First you connect the tube to the cylinder and then you fill it up with liquid.’ you may note that he should use passive constructions for describing a process.

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After you add your corrections, make it clear whether you expect the student to do the writing over again. Redoing the work helps to fix the corrections in the student’s mind, but sometimes he’s sick of the sight of it by then and may prefer to transfer the information to a new piece of writing. I encourage students to keep a copy of the original anyway so that they can compare that one, the teacher-edited version and the new improved one.

Marking criteria