Trial and error and trial again

It wasn't until the late 1960's that we changed our paradigm of ESL students as producers of faulty English to intelligent, creative thinkers who are working through the progression.  A progression to produce closer and closer approximations of the complicated linguistic system that native speakers use with ease.

We started to look not just at the errors that the students were making but at the creative brilliance behind their successful hypothesizing and testing routines.  Encouraging good habits of hypothesizing and testing, encouraging students to make the errors and learn from them and providing an environment where the students feel not just safe but enthusiastic about doing this is simply the hallmark of a strong ESL educator.

But how do you measure up with your consistency in confirming or refuting these hypotheses?  In his book Teach like a champion, Doug Lemov gives some great tips on how to establish a standard for right and wrong answers and states that it is important to uphold the standard.  Giving a response that does not confirm the correctness or incorrectness of the answer in the students' minds is not doing them any justice.
And therein lies the balance of being a strict judge and a lenient peacemaker.  The greatest skill that a teacher can have is the ability to constantly monitor and correct the troops and yet maintain the morale to keep them marching.

Are we being loyal to our methodology?

  It seems to me that if you look at the theories that existed in the past about how we learn languages, we   see a lot of how we are teaching today.

In the 50’s and 60’s the leading line of thought was behaviorism.  Behaviorism was focused on what we could record.  The utterance was all that counted and researchers were not interested in the cognitive process that brought that utterance into being.

Derived from experiments on dogs and other animals, behaviorism said that children start with a blank slate and they get everything from their environment.  They learn their patterns of behavior, their personality and even their knowledge through conditioning (this had a good result, do it again; this had a bad result, avoid it next time).

This is what we are doing with correction.  There is still so much of this going on in the classroom and the results on the affective factors of each student should not be underestimated.  We try and we learn on the results of that attempt.  This school of thinking was unable to explain how students learned to be so creative with the language but it did have a huge effect on how we teach.

In 1964, Jenkins and Palermo[1] timidly put forward a theory that children learn through creating language frames and learning to substitute.  They said that imitation is essential in learning to put together authentic-sounding utterances in this way.

Doesn’t this sound like such a big part of what goes on in the classroom?  We teach a grammar structure and the students practice substituting the verbs and the nouns into the sentence to make it mean what they want it to mean. 

When they published this theory, they admitted their statements to be speculative and premature (p. 143).  I think that their hesitation comes from the fact that they are not describing how children learn their first language but they are putting forward a methodology that is commonly-used in classrooms and textbooks around the world.

Now we are faced with a multitude of approaches and methodologies which are grouped together as Communicative Language Teaching (CLT).  CLT is about helping people to discover the language through communication not through memorization and getting students to enjoy being creative and focusing on competence in communication (performance).

But still the aspects of behaviorism and substituting into frameworks remain in every classroom.  Are these remnants of past ways or just practical differences that remind us that there are differences between first language(s) acquisition and second language acquisition?

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[1] Jenkins, J. & Palermo, D. (1964). Mediation processes and the acquisition of linguistic structure.  In U. Bellugi & R. Brown, The Acquisition of Language.  Monographs of the society for research in child development, 29 (Serial no. 92).

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.