8.17 A final word about lesson plans
The above might seem like a lot to think about, but once you have your plan, you can
analyse it to see whether the above guidelines have been met. Of course, you might
be using a course book. In such cases the book will provide the outline for your lesson
plan. I advise you to look ahead through the unit of the book you are about to start.
Look at it with a critical eye: you might find that the beginning of the unit focuses on
language presentation and practice and that the end of the unit is more skills focused.
You might decide to cover all aspects of the unit but to approach them in a different
order. You might also decide to omit parts of the unit because your students don’t need
practice in that point; you might also think that your students need more practice in one
aspect of the unit and decide to supplement it. In any case, when planning it is
essential to bear in mind your students; many textbooks are excellent but only you
know your students.
Finally, whilst I think it is wise to use a plan, I also think there are times when you can
move away from it and even discard it totally. If something is too difficult or too easy for
your students, you might decide to abandon the task at an appropriate moment. If your
students arrive and talk excitedly about a topic of importance to them, I suggest you go
with the flow. Just take advantage of their chattiness and use it as a learning point.
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CHAPTER 9: ERROR CORRECTION
Errors are a natural part of the learning process. Students make mistakes when they
are learning a new language item; even when language has been presented, revised
and practised repeatedly, students can still make mistakes. Errors and mistakes will
always occur, it’s how we deal with them that determines whether or not our students
learn from their mistakes. Correcting errors is essential for students to learn and
improve and to avoid a situation where they continue making the same mistake and
eventually believe that what they are saying is correct. Errors and their correction can
be used to help students consolidate their knowledge of a language point and to foster
good learning habits. This approach to students’ errors will be the focus of this chapter.
Firstly, we’ll take a look at the different types of errors that students make. According to
Julian Edge, there are 3 categories of error: slips, errors and attempts. Slip refers to a
situation where a mistake has been made, the student knows the language point, (s)he
is capable of correcting the mistake. An example of a slip is an intermediate student
saying, “I’ve ate my dinner”. In this case the learner knows the correct answer “I’ve
eaten my dinner” but forgot it momentarily or it just came out the wrong way. When
prompted the student can correct a slip. Native speakers also make this type of error.
The second category, Julian Edge calls errors. These are mistakes that the student
cannot correct himself. There are 2 main categories of this type of error: false-friends
and over-generalisations. False friends refer to words that exist in the student’s own
language and that have a similar word in English with a different meaning; the learner
might assume the word is the same. An example of this is the Spanish word
“embarazada” which means pregnant. A Spanish student might use the word
“embarrassed” incorrectly, believing it is a translation of “embarazada”. An over-
generalisation occurs at a point where the student is assimilating language but hasn’t
fully mastered it yet. For example, an elementary student who says “I taked the bus
yesterday” demonstrates that they have learnt that an “ed” ending denotes a past
tense. They have just over-generalised the rule and applied it to a verb that is irregular
in the past tense. Young children also make this type of error in their mother tongue;
for example, you might hear a child talking about sheeps as the plural of sheep.
The final type of error is where the student quite simply doesn’t know or hasn’t
encountered the language item yet. This type of error frequently occurs during free
speaking practice and free writing practice. The student has an idea that (s)he wishes
to express but doesn’t know the corresponding language item. They try to put their
idea into words; J Edge refers to this as an attempt. For example, a low-intermediate
student might say, “If I knew, I would done it”. Obviously, the student has made
incorrect choices of tense but the student hasn’t yet encountered or studied the third
conditional: “If I had known, I would have done it”.
The above is a summary of Julian Edge’s definition of errors. Our role as teachers is to
distinguish between the different types of error and decide which need to be corrected
immediately, which we will focus on later and which we will not correct. Our decisions
will be based on the level that our students are at; what we have been working on
recently in class and what we think the students should have mastered by now. We
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also need to consider what the focus of the activity is: during accuracy work, the
teacher will correct more often and sooner than during fluency work (for definitions of
accuracy and fluency see Chapter 1).
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