Error Correction

17 Nov 2011

Lately, I've been writing a lot about second language acquisition and best practices in teaching. Those have been things that have been on my mind recently. I've settled into my job here, and I think that my teachers are starting to take my suggestions seriously.

In particular, I've been trying to work on my approach to error correction. In my Methods of Teaching World Languages class, we talked about a number of approaches to correcting student errors and which ones were more likely to lead to uptake (student recognition of his or her error).

There is a lot that goes into error correction. Obviously, a teacher doesn't want to (indeed, can't) correct every error that a student makes. If that were the case, the teacher would spent all of his or her time correcting students, and none of the students would want to speak for fear of being corrected. So a teacher has to decide what his or her priorities are for correcting students. Does the teacher only correct the grammar they are currently working on? Does the teacher correct all pronunciation errors?

Sometimes, there is a tendency to not to correct errors if the student more or less conveys his or her thoughts. This is especially problematic in immersion programs. A study conducted in a Canadian immersion school demonstrated that students were not typically corrected because teachers understood the students’ interlanguage (the language ability that they are developing in their second language; it contains elements from their first language). Teachers did not correct students because they understood what students were trying to say even if there language had many errors. This led to a lack of student growth in the target language because their errors were going uncorrected.


There are a few different types of error correction. One of the ones I most commonly use (though I'm trying to break the habit) is called recasting. As the name would suggests, this involves restating the student's sentence in the corrected form. Frequently, my students forget (or don't pronounce) the -s morpheme--such as, "María like going to the cinema." I repeat back to them (with emphasis) the correct sentence: "María LIKES going to the cinema." However, research shows that this method of error correction isn't necessarily as effective as others. It tends to work better for older students--who are more likely to notice the correction.

Up until this point, I've worked with college-age students who will notice the difference when I correct them using recasting. Now that I'm working with younger students, I'm trying to change my approach to better suit their needs. Studies show that explicit feedback--such as clarification requests (the teacher indicates that he or she doesn't understand what the student said and asks them to clarify what they mean), repetition (the teacher repeats the student's error--emphasizing the error), and metalinguistic feedback (indicates that there is an error without actually giving the corrected form)--are more likely to lead to uptake for students of any age. This is because students have to figure out their error for themselves. They have to think about what they've said and how to correct it.