Hot or Cold Correction?

Carol Numrich made an excellent presentation last week on giving oral feedback, which really challenged the way I look at hot and cold correction.

Typically we choose not to give hot correction during speaking activities because we believe it interrupts the students' flow of thought and may embarass them in front of their classmates. Also, as Carol points out, 75% of communication in English is done by non-native speakers, and students should be able to deal with mistakes in what they hear.

Anyone preparing students for exams will know that the criteria for marking speaking usually allows any errors which do not impede communication. Actually, only certain errors have been proven to impede communcation. Those are, for example, the distinction between /p/ and /b/ at the beginning of words, and the difference between long and short vowels (a mistake I hear in almost all of our students in Russia). Interestingly, most consonant sounds cause problems if they are not pronounced properly, but not /th/, something we try to drill into our students in countries where this sound does not exist.

Those errors all deal with pronunciation. Well, what about grammatical errors? According to Numrich, Seidlhofer (2004) states that errors which do not impede are forgetting the 3rd person -s, confusing who and which, and misusing articles. There are others, but I have named these as they are errors which I feel usually have my colleagues and I tearing our hair out over. 'He's advanced, how can he still say "he do"!!' As if we didn't know that this particular mistake is one of the very last to be corrected in any learner, native or otherwise.

It is also difficult to know whether these mistakes are actually just slips, and correcting them might just frustrate our learners.

So perhaps we don't need to correct all these errors then at all?

Well, certainly many Russian students would have a very low opinion of their teacher if he or she just passed over all these errors. So which method should we use?

According to Carol's study, most teachers prefer to recast the student's mistake. It's fast and it's teacher-controlled, so the teacher can mentally pat himself on the back. 'I corrected this mistake!'

(For more info on types of error correction, Olenka Bilash's site has a very detailed summary. http://www2.education.ualberta.ca/staff/olenka.Bilash/best%20of%20bilash/error%20correction.html )

But apparently our students don't hear this as correction! When we recast the student's sentence, he understands it as clarification of meaning, not grammar. (The brain works in strange and wonderous ways.) So the student thinks the teacher didn't understand where he went, not the fact that he got his past simple wrong.

Two of the many problems that Carol mentioned connected to recasting are i) the teacher may not take into consideration the stage in the student's own development, ie. is he ready to perfect the 3rd person -s or is he still learning what a verb is at all? and ii) just because a mistake has been corrected, does it mean the student has actually learnt not to make this error?

If the teacher chooses to recast, we are recommended to keep it short and focussed on only one error at a time. We are advised not to raise our voice as we question their sentence, or the learner will think we are seeking clarification of meaning, rather than language. Instead, if we use a firm, flat intonation pattern, the unusualness of the teacher's voice will draw the student's attention to the fact that a mistake has been made.

But there are other options available to us. We could ask the student to clarify what he has just said. We could use metalanguage, if the student is able to understand the terminology: 'Is that 2nd Conditional?' We could elicit the correct version from the leaner or from the rest of the class. But most importantly, the correction should be explicit and immediate.

Bang goes cold correction. Haven't I just spent ten years teaching myself to collect mistakes for the end of the lesson instead of jumping in every time I hear a mistake?

Perhaps this week I'll try to get out of my groove and give hot correction every time. I wonder will my students notice? I wonder will they be offended? And I wonder will their accuracy be a lot better because of it? Let's see...

(Many thanks to Carol Numrich and Pearson Longman - this is not intended to be plagiarism, just my musings on the topic.)

Understanding emotions (CAE Listening)

Part four of CAE Listening involves matching two lists of words or phrases to five short extracts that students hear twice. I've noticed that the second list more often than not is a list of emotions, but since lists of emotions and feelings reach the hundreds (if you google them), how can ensure that my students can cope with this task?

I've noticed that certain emotion feature more often than others. 'Resignation', for example, seems to pop up regularly, and this is not something I can assume my students know, so I decided that their attention needs to be drawn to some words explicitly. I am not against telling exam classes: Learn this word because I've seen it ten times on an exam paper! Not a meaningful way of dealing with the word, but at least it's effective.

Just asking students to learn a list of emotions may help them to expand their productive vocabulary, but it may not help them complete the task any better. Why not, if they understand all the words?

The greatest problem with defining emotions is that many are very similar, and the strength of an emotion may vary from person to person. To understand intensity, we brainstormed synonyms for common, general emotions, eg. sad, happy, hurt, confused, and then tried to agree on a ranking from most extreme to least.

But how can I be sure that my students understand the fine distinctions between words, eg. the difference between despair and helplessness?

If I had more time and better resources, I would use a corpus to show a variety of situations in which an emotion is used. As I don't, I decided to ask the students to try to get inside the feeling themself

The task:

• We studied the exam task: Decide in which sport the speaker had an accident, and how he felt at the time.
• We predicted: If I had an accident parachuting, I wouldn't feel hope, I would feel terror... etc.
• We carried out the task and checked it.
• We wrote emotions on slips of paper, put them in a hat and drew one out in secret.
• Students created a personal story of about 30 seconds to describe this emotion without using the word or its synonyms.
• The class guessed which emotion was illustrated.

On the surface, this looks like just a repetition of the exam task, but the key here was that students had to fully understand the nuances of 'their' emotion in order for the others to guess correctly. If they misunderstood their word, they chose expressions which were not quite accurate enough, and the class failed to come to the right conclusion. From the teacher's point of view, it was very clear which students didn't quite understand the word and which words caused more problems than others.

We will spend more time on the contexts for these emotions, and then repeat this task at a later date. Hopefully their stories will be more exact.

Successes: I was impressed by my youngest student illustrating petrified by: 'I couldn't move, I was turned to stone!' None of the class were aware that the origin of this word lies in the Greek for stone!

'Overwhelmed' seems to be used at lot in my class, but never quite right, until today, when I muttered at a student who was going on and on about Czech beer, 'Alcoholic!', at which her jaw dropped in amazement and her eyes almost popped out, and the rest of the class pointed at her and shouted: 'Overwhelmed!!!'

Consequences on the Computer - Part 1

I guess most of us have played consequences at some point in our lessons. If you don't recognise the name, it's that activity where a student writes the first line of a story, prompted or otherwise, folds over the paper and passes it on for the next student to continue.

Consequences is good for motivating students to write, helping uncreative students develop an imagination, handwriting practice, reading practice...

To be honest, this isn't the kind of activity I was thinking of giving my Advanced teenagers today, but suddenly I wondered whether I could give it a modern twist on our class blog.

The advantage of using the blog is that it will encourage my class to check it more often, to see the next line of the story. They could even all be online at once, vying to post the next sentence before their classmates.

The disadvantage of course is that they can see the story as it develops, so there is no element of surprise at the end.

I could get around this by asking them to do it in class time, where each student will have, say, only 90 seconds to write the next line, forcing them to skim the text or just pay attention to the last line. The previously written part could actually be hidden from view until the end.

What I'd like to do most is take all the students to the computer room, give them a computer each, and have the students change computer after every line, instead of swapping papers. Fast typing in another alphabet is a useful skill for my group. If I were more familiar with twitter, that would be a third option for Consequences on the Computer.

If we do one of these activities, I'll post our results...

Report cards for teens

It's the end of the academic year in our school. Last year I used continuous assessment with my teens, so at the end of the term I hand-made little cards and wrote some personal comments inside for each teenager. The categories followed the FCE papers, since that is what the kids were studying for: Reading, Writing, Use of English, Listening and Speaking. I simply wrote my subjective comments about each student under each heading.

The goal of this was more to encourage than to provide serious feedback. I wanted my weaker students to feel that their progress had been noted and that grammar was not the be-all and end-all of language learning. I wanted to give the stronger students some tips on how to continue excelling outside the classroom.

I must admit, the idea seemed better in the teachers' room than in front of the students. I felt rather silly handing out hand-made cards....

Only this year have I noticed the effect these cards had (exam students, please note the use of inversion!). I handed out certificates a little early as some students were leaving the course before the actual end of year, and heard to my surprise, "What about those cards we had last year?"

Happy Teacher went away from class feeling that not everything she does is useless and unnoticed.

Stressed Teacher now has to go make those report cards..... :-)

Blogging with Teenagers

To encourage teenagers to continue studying as we approach the end of the academic year, our school has launched a class blog competition. As my class has long finished the coursebook and also taken their exams, I thought a blog would go down really well.

Why do I like the blog idea?

• It's a rolling activity that keeps students interested from one lesson to the next.
• It allows students to choose how much or how little they want to contribute.
• It is completely personalised writing, as students choose the topics.
• It allows free expression.
• It is a genuine interactive task because students can comment on each others' posts.
• It creates class unity.
• It allows the teacher to assess their writing informally - and the students don't even know. :-)

But... my teenagers were not amused....

"Yeah, we did that in school."

"I had a blog about three years ago, but I don't write anything now."

"What's it for?"

Yet again the old-fashioned teacher has tried to get inside the teenagers' heads and failed....

However, they livened up somewhat when I mentioned that it would be a class blog, not individual. (Hmm... so they like working together.) And they positively got excited when I gave them the first task. (I have never seen the whole class take out their notebooks and write down the homework!)

Task 1: Find a famous person, living or dead, with the same name as you and write their biography as if you were this person.

• I got two queens, a princess, a sports commentator and a painter.

Task 2: Post a painting you have strong feelings about and explain why.

• Such a variety of artistic tastes. I never realised my group thought so deeply about art!

Task 3: Read four short texts and comment on the one you find most interesting.

• I then planned a lesson based on the text that was commented on most.

Check out our beautiful blog!

Feeling sorry for PET candidates....

Well, I'm feeling sorry for some PET candidates at the moment. Luckily, not any from my school.

I was invigilating the PET exam at the weekend and was very disappointed to see how unfamiliar they were with the format of the exam. Their level of English wasn't a problem. They simply had never seen a PET exam paper before.

Some of their questions:

How do you spell accessories? (Don't they know I can't help??)

Is it a problem if I write more words than this?

What do I write in this part?

Can I write on the exam paper?

What do I do here?!

What is it that makes teachers care so little about their students? Teachers who go through the motions in the classroom but never stop to check whether the students have actually aquired the necessary knowledge?

The Many Ways to Use Lists

Yesterday I watched Lindsay Clandfield talking at the Istek conference in Turkey. His topic was using lists in the classroom.

I've always been a fan of lists for various reasons, but Clandfield has turned list-compilation into a profession! His website www.sixthings.net is a collection of lists on all sorts of topics, for classroom use and otherwise.

*To do lists: could be used to teach grammar points such as the imperative or present perfect.

I liked the activity where students write a to do list of five things they've done this week and two they plan to do, then they interview each other, asking, "Have you washed the car yet?" They should reply in full, such as: "No, not yet, because I haven't had time."

*Shopping lists: for chunks of language like a carton of milk, a crate of beer...

*To teach intonation: I never thought about how we read lists out loud. Clandfield pointed out the importance of using the right intonation with a story from one of his Japanese students. She apparently always using rising intonation, and wondered why bar-tenders and waiters kept asking her, "...and?" not understanding that she had finished her order.

*Student-generated lists: These make good pyramid activities, where students choose their top five something, then create a larger group to justify and rethink their list, and so on.

*Reasons: Tonight I'm going to try Clandfield's name activity: Five reasons why it's good / bad to be called Sarah...

What do you use lists for?

Wordle for Use of English - 1

My FCE students have just finished their first full Use of English paper. In general, I was pleased with the results, as all but one passed, and we still have plenty of time before the exam. Interestingly though, they all did very badly in Part 1, so my current goal is to find ways to train them in this part without simply repeating the exam task a hundred times.

The task involves choosing the most appropraite word from 4 options which are very similar, or identical, in meaning. The task tests knowledge of:

a) phrasal verbs

b) collocations

c) set expressions

d) synonyms

e) linkers.

I think that it is the synonyms, the finer nuances of vocabulary, that are the greatest stumbling block, so I decided to use a Wordle to focus the students' attention on shades of meaning.

i) I went to www.wordle.net and entered 24 vocabulary items on the same topic, in this case crime. The words were in groups of 4, with categories such as Criminal, Verb, Punishment, etc.

ii) Wordle scattered my words tandomly, splitting up the categories.

iii) I printed the Wordle and gave a copy to each pair of students.

iv) The students tried to group the words into categories. They could choose their own categories and titles.

v) Once the categories were complete, the students explained to one another how they understood the difference between, for example, con artist / fraudster / embezzler / forger.

The advantages were that I could monitor and hear their explanations, finding out which words were proving difficult and thus needed to be clarified later. The Wordle is a great visual tool, but the circling and categorising suits those who like to engage with paper themselves. The students got plenty of spoken practice, as well as vocab recycling, and there was a certain amount of autonomy in the activity as they could create any category they liked, as long as they could justify it logically.

I think they wondered why I had gone to so much trouble with the preparation, and would have been just as happy to listen to a list and write them down, but I hope that this activity will help memorise the words and strengthen the awareness of finer differences.

My Favourite Teaching Quote

Education is the manifestation of the perfection that already exists in man.