Teaching English

Teaching English

  • Submitted By: Duckling77
  • Date Submitted: 11/28/2014 6:51 AM
  • Category: English
  • Words: 459
  • Page: 2
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".........the tendency is for teachers to be over-preoccupied with accuracy. This means that the student's work is often covered in red ink and no comment is made about whether the work was interesting or succeeded in its purposes."

The Practice of English Language Teaching by Jeremy Harmer

What is your view?



We need to decide if pointing out every mistake is really beneficial to the student or rather demotivating. Why did the student make this error? What is the reason for it? As we could read in Unit 2 Module 5, teachers tend to overcorrect their student’s work and cover it in red ink without wondering why the error came up. A teacher should always keep searching why the error occurred.
We can show incorrectness in many different ways, i.e. repeating or echoing and hinting which are my favorite ways. I have one student who often uses the –ed ending for past tense even if the verbs are irregular and have a different form that he just has to learn. I like to repeat his sentence and change the speed and intonation of that verb form; he knows then what the mistake is and thinks about the correct verb form. Very often he remembers it, if not, I provide hints.
Reformulation is another good way let the students know what they did wrong as well as expression. I use to raise my right eyebrow and my students know me well, they immediately think about what they said and often correct themselves when they see me raising my eyebrow. Statement and question also is helpful although I do not like it very much and therefore do not use it very often.
A teacher has to make differences between correcting written and oral work. As we can read in Unit 2 Module 5, “we need to be extremely sensitive about the way we give feedback and the way we correct. This means, for example, not reacting to absolutely every mistake that a student makes if this will demotivate that particular student. It means judging just the right moment to correct, taking into account the...

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