Writing imperfectly

When I teach writing in class, the first thing I do is ask students to write a letter so that I can see what they can do.  I analyze all the mistakes in that letter and from that point on, I know what to teach.  What you have to understand with this is that I am never trying to completely eliminate their mistakes.

You see, if they make no mistakes, it is probably because they are reproducing the same material that they have already learned and are not stretching themselves.  So, I focus on eliminating the punctuation and spelling mistakes, and I am trying to eliminate the grammatical mistakes that they are making now and help them to make more complex mistakes in the future. 

When the mistakes they make are the same as a native speaker would make then I know that I have taught them well.

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.

Authentic modelling means authentic production

When we do pronunciation work with students, I find that it helps to cover the word that you are practicing first. Correcting pronunciation is about the sounds and you should eliminate the distraction of the letters and the expected sounds first and focus solely on the phonological side.  When the student has mastered the sound, then it is important to show how we represent that with letters and discuss differences between expected sounds and real sounds.

When you are doing pronunciation practice on a sentence level, never get students to read the sentence from the board.  This is where back-chaining comes in.  Back-chaining is where you start with the last word/words and add words to it to form a sentence from the end.  This stops the student from jumping ahead.

• Beach.
• To the beach.
• I went to the beach.

I am not a big fan of students reading aloud as it creates an unnatural, monotonous rhythm that is not how we speak.  When I do choral work, it is always with natural intonation which means it should be led by the teacher not by written material.  If you do reading aloud, try to focus on getting the students to read in a natural intonation which is not always possible as written material was designed to be consumed silently by the mind.