Tip for teachers: Taking students errors and using them to make learning materials I posted a number of incorrect sentences yesterday and asked people to find the errors and correct them. Not many people tried. This might be because people are busy due to Eid, but it might be because these sentences didnt appear wrong. The errors in the sentences were taken from mistakes that students have actually made in their writing, and I did this for a reason. One of the best ways to help you identify important mistakes is for me to take the mistakes that you actually make and to use them to make error correction exercises. This approach is different from what many students and teachers use. Often students and teachers focus only on the rule and use that to make activities. This kind of teaching is called different things: rule-based or deductive. It begins with the rules and then tries to predict (by deduction from the rules) mistakes students might make, and it provides exercises and activities designed to fix those errors. It is useful but it is just one way for teaching and learning to take place. There are other approaches. The one I used yesterday is called different things: inductive or performance-based or production-based. It starts not from the rules but from the language produced by learners and it identifies errors they actually make, and then tries to find exercises and activities to fix those. Both approaches (rule-based / deductive AND performance-based / production-based / inductive) are important and both should be used, but most classrooms and texbooks rely too heavily on the deductive / rule-based method. Below, I will give the errors and also the corrections.
Posted on: Wed, 30 Jul 2014 14:04:52 +0000
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