Who should correct learners’ errors?
One important question is who should correct learners’ errors. There are three possible answers to the question: the teacher, the learner him/herself or the others learners (peer-correction). But this will depend on the importance or success of the error corrections, as well as the ability of the students to do self or peer correction.
Are teachers inconsistent in their treatment of learning errors?
2) Teachers are also inconsistent in their treatment of learning errors. (Because errors are not always corrected). Also, Allwright (1996: 33) asserted that another possibility is that other learners in the classroom could help by providing corrective feedback if it is necessary.
How do students react to the error treatment?
Pholsward (2001: @), in his investigation at the University of Thai Chamber of Commerce at the Faculty of Humanities in the language department of English, about students’ reaction to the error treatment, concluded that most students were quite relaxed and satisfied as they helped each other in a group’s attempt to identify errors.
Do second language learners correct other learners’ errors?
In one experimental study related to this issue, Porter (1986, mentioned in Chaudron, 1993: 71) found that second language learners were able to accurately correct other learners’ errors, though they rarely did so.
What is a classroom strategy toolkit?
A variety of classroom methods for developing English listening, speaking, reading, and writing skills are offered. A carefully designed strategy toolkit, with a clear process for use, enables educators to teach clearly and consistently.
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A Course for Teaching English Learners combines the fundamental principles of education with practical English language education techniques to help both pre- and in-service educators reach English language students in impactful ways. The text provides background in cultural, linguistic, and sociocultural context, building a comprehensive framework for effective English language education. Uniquely, the text outlines both psychological and sociocultural contexts at play at all school levels, including second-language acquisition hurdles and strategies for teaching content subjects. The 3rd Edition has been updated with a wealth of new and revised content, including new information on evolving certification requirements, modern demographic data, technology-enhanced language learning, translanguaging, and more.
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The third edition of this popular handbook brings together theories, ideas, and resources for promoting crosscultural awareness, language development, and academic progress for English learners. It ties together culture and language in a comprehensive format and delves deeply into the educational challenges faced by classroom teachers.
Why is it important for teachers to be open to correction?
This means our job as teachers is to help build openness to corrections, but also to protect students from the humiliation of being told they are wrong in front of their peers.
How do emergent bilinguals benefit from teachers?
With written language, emergent bilinguals have time to edit their work, so they benefit when teachers provide feedback on errors by using formative assessments rather than by teaching traditional grammar rules. MacDonald and her colleagues (2015) describe a four-step cycle for formative assessments.
Who is Anabel Gonzalez?
Anabel Gonzalez is a Secondary ESL Teacher with the Mooresville Graded School District in North Carolina. She teaches students in grades 7-12 of various backgrounds, languages, and English proficiency levels. She has been a member of the Center for Teaching Quality Collaboratory since 2014.
Do native speakers make developmental errors?
These are normal errors that disappear as children move through the developmental stages of language acquisition. While teachers usually assume that native speakers will make these normal, developmental errors, they may feel that they should correct the kinds of errors emergent bilinguals make.
Why is error correction important?
Although error correction seems time consuming, it helps students to focus their attention and to reduce their dependence on the teacher, and this reduction of dependence encourages students’ autonomy.
What is error correction?
As I mentioned before, error correction is the classroom activity that most people think as one of the language teacher’s most important functions (Nunan, 1989: 9). This is because most of the time the teacher is the one who corrects.
What does it mean to be a teacher of a foreign language?
Being a teacher of a foreign language implies having certain skills, whether by nature, acquired outside teaching, or arising from university studies in education. They may also gain this knowledge with books concerning issues of education or by taking professional courses on the subject.
What does Holley and King suggest?
Holley and King (1971, cited in Hendrickson, ibidem.) suggest that teachers should not use the methods which make learners feel embarrassed or frustrated. Therefore, teachers should be more sensitive about how to respond to learner errors.
Why are teachers more self confident?
Knowing all these types of error correction techniques (named also as feedback) teachers are more self-confident on what they are doing, because they know that the type of feedback they give to their students is mentioned in the seven techniques pointed out before, and they make sure they are doing right.
How is motivation related to error correction?
Motivation is related to error correction in English language learning because the manner teacher corrects, is the way in which students are going to react to teacher’s correction. Students’ main goal is to participate in communication with other people.
What is the dilemma of correcting or not correcting?
Concerning to correction, Lyster & Ranta (1977: 51) acknowledge that there is a certain dilemma in this regard: if teachers do not correct errors, opportunities for students to make links between form and functions are reduced; if teachers do correct errors, they risk interrupting the flow of communication.
How does error analysis help in learning?
Firstly, by error analysis, teachers will get an overall knowledge about the students’ errors. Foreign language learning is a process of hypothesis and trial and error occurrence is inevitable. So the teacher should learn to tolerate some errors, especially some local errors. Secondly, errors can tell the teacher how far towards the goal the learner has progressed and consequently, what remains for him or her to learn. So students’ errors are valuable feedbacks. We can do some remedial teaching based on their errors. Thirdly, errors are indispensable to the learners themselves, for we can regard the making of mistakes as a device the learner employs in order to learn. Finally, some errors need to be handled, otherwise, they will become fossilized. In a sense, error analysis theory together with other theories have enriched the second language learning theory in that learning involves in a process in which success comes by profiting from mistakes and by using mistakes to obtain feedback from the environment. With the feedback they make new attempts to achieve the more closely approximate desired goals. Certainly, error analysis is significant, but it also has its limitations. First, there is a danger in too much attention to learners’ errors and in the classroom teacher tends to become so preoccupied with noticing errors that the correct utterance in the second language will go unnoticed. While the diminishing of errors is an important criterion for increasing language proficiency, the ultimate goal of second language learning is the attainment of communicative fluency in a language. Another shortcoming in error analysis is the overstressing of production data. Factually language comprehension is as important as production. It also happens that production lends itself to analysis and thus becomes the prey of researchers, but comprehension data is equally important in developing an understanding of the process of language acquisition. Thirdly, it fails to account for the strategy of avoidance. A learner who for one reason or another avoids a particular sound, word, structure or discourse category may be assumed incorrectly to have no difficulty therewith. The absence of error therefore does not necessarily reflect native like competence since learners may be avoiding the very structure that poses difficulty for them. Finally, error analysis can keep us too closely focused on specific languages rather than viewing universal aspects of language.
What are the three principles of error correction?
Firstly, the techniques involved in error correction would be able to enhance the students’ accuracy in expression. Secondly, the students’ affective factors should be taken into consideration and the correction should not be face-threatening to the students.
What is error analysis in EFL?
Error analysis is associated with a rich and complex psycholinguistic view of the learner, but the sophisticated use is in its infancy. As EFL teachers, we should be aware of what is going on in the field of EA and keep a keen eye on the related theories. In order to improve teaching, we need to explore the learners’ psychological process in language learning so that we can enhance our understanding of learners’ errors. Based on the analysis of the causes of their errors, we provide our timely guide and help. In addition, while placing an emphasis on error correction in the classroom, as language teachers, we should take the teaching objectives, students’ linguistic competence, their affective factors and the effectiveness of the error correction into consideration. Consequently, we can employ more flexible strategies in error correction and make more contributions to the EFL classroom teaching and learning.
What are the differences between global and local errors?
Burt (1975) made a distinction between “global” and “local” errors. Global errors hinder communication and they prevent the learner from comprehending some aspects of the message. Local errors only affect a single element of a sentence, but do not prevent a message from being heard. According to Hendrickson (1980), global errors need not be corrected and they are generally held true. But the expressions such as “a news”, or “an advice” are systematic errors, and they need to be corrected. As for pre-systematic errors, teachers can simply provide the correct one. For systematic errors, since learners have already had the linguistic competence, they can explain this kind of errors and correct them themselves. So teachers just remind them when they commit such errors. As to what kind of errors should be corrected, it needs teachers’ intuition and understanding of errors. At the same time, the teacher should consider the purpose of the analysis and analyze them in a systematic way.
What is error treatment?
Error treatment is a very complicated and thorny problem. As language teachers, we need to be armed with some theoretical foundations and be aware of what we are doing in the classroom. Here principles of optimal affective and cognitive feedback, of reinforcement theory, and of communicative language teaching all combine to form these theoretical foundations. With these theories in mind, we can judge in the classroom whether we will treat or ignore the errors, when and how to correct them.
What is error correction in foreign language?
In foreign language learning, error correction has become one of the important teaching processes. But actually, few teachers know a lot about error analysis and some related theories. They often take so negative attitudes toward errors that they could not tolerate any errors and tend to correct them as soon as they could find any. As a result, although they think they have been working hard enough and spend much time and energy working on error correction, their effort is not effective and the students do not believe they have benefited a lot. On the contrary, the students often feel upset, for they have found that there is a great gap between themselves and their teachers in dealing with errors and understanding of error correction. So we find it necessary to have a theoretical foundation about error analysis. In the next section, the development of the theory—error analysis would be briefly reviewed.
What are the weaknesses of contrastive analysis?
The weaknesses of contrastive analysis are that it overemphasized the interference of the outer environment of language study, but the language learners themselves are totally neglected. While interlanguage intended to explore learning strategies based on the learners’ errors, and it has become the basis of error analysis.