Correcting or nagging?

Studies have actually failed to show that explicit error correction causes a permanent improvement in production for learners of a second language.  Lightbown (1985) and others have then come to the conclusion that isolated error correction is usually ineffective in changing behaviour.

If you think about it, direct error correction usually relies on the student having an understanding of the correct form, they just mispoke because they are in the habit of mispeaking having never been successfully corrected before. 

If they do not have this underlying understanding of the correct form, they must be exposed to it in order for the language to make sense to them before they will reliably produce it correctly.  Surely, this will take multiple exposures and in the few hours that most ESL students spend in the classroom with many other students, a reoccurrance of the same error will take some time.

Point of this being that if you really want to correct behaviour, the best way to do this is to correct the belief that underlies the behaviour.

Lightbown, P. (1985).  Great expectations: Second language acquisition research and classroom teaching.  Applied Linguistics, 6, 173-189.

Correcting our student's writing

We can divide correction into Direct and Indirect Correction.  Indirect Correction is where the teacher does not correct the mistake; they just indicate where the mistake is and let the student correct the language themselves. 

Studies have shown that because of the cognitive processes in play when the student has to identify and then correct the error for themselves, the long term benefits of Indirect Correction are clearly superior. 

Interestingly enough, studies have also shown no significant difference between Coded and Uncoded Correction in the long term.  Coded Correction is where the teacher gives the student the reason the language is incorrect (such as “sp” for spelling).  Students were 75% as successful (Ferris et al, 2000) at self-correcting when no codes were given yet the long term results were the same.

We also make a distinction between Global and Local Errors.  Global Errors interfere with the understandability of the text where Local Errors are minor errors that do not.  There is no evidence to suggest that treating the two kinds of errors differently have any impact on student writing.

Treatable and Untreatable Errors.  Treatable errors are errors that the student can find a rule for to help them to correct it.  Examples include tense errors, subject-verb agreement errors and plural errors.  Untreatable Errors are idiosyncratic and they need to have met this language before to correct it.  Examples include using the wrong word and idiomatic expressions.

Obviously, focusing on Treatable Errors of both the Global and Local variety using Indirect Correction in either Coded or Uncoded fashion is the way to go.  Hopefully, understanding these distinctions will help us to correct our students’ writing in a way that provides long-term benefits.

For verbal correction see here.