Focusing on language
Errors and correction
Correction techniques can help students to make their corrections.
Working with oral errors in class
Sometimes language can be grammatically correct but completly innapropiate in the context in wich it is used.
When to correct
- Inmmediately.
- After a few minutes.
- At the end of the activity.
- Later in the lesson.
- At the end of the lesson.
- In the next lesson.
- Later in the course.
Objectives of speaking activities and when to correct.
Accuracy:
- Focused on inmediately corection.
Fluency:
- Brief, immediate correction (scaffolding).
Ideas for correcting/indicating errors
- Tell the students.
- Use facial expressios.
- Gestures with facial expressions.
- Use finger correction.
- Repeat sentence up to error.
- Echo sentence with changed intonation/stress.
- Ask questions.
Testing
- Internal school test: Progress test.
- External school test: Profiency test.
Three criteria for a good test.
- Fair and appropiate.
- No troublesome to mark.
- Clear results.
Marking tests
Objectively: there is a clear correct answer, ad every marker would give the same marks to the same questions.
Subjectively: the marking depends largely on the personal decision of the marker.
Some common discrete-item testing techniques
- Gap fill.
- Sentence transformation.
- Sentence construction and reconstruction.
- Two-options answers.
- Matching.
Dictionaries
Printed; Digital.
Monolingual; Bilingual.
Activities work on different dictionary skills.
- Guessing spelling.
- Wich word?.
- Anagrams.
- Dictionary race.
Time Lines
A tool for clarifying the time of different verb tenses.
It attempts to make the flow of the time visible.
It enables learners to see more clearly exactly how one tense difers from another.