Tip of the Month
If you want your students to be successful learners of English, you should help them to build up their confidence and self-esteem. The following activity is taken from “The Confidence Book” by Paul Davis and Mario Rinvolucri (Longman, 1990). It emphasises the value of getting the text from the students, to lead them to a greater awareness of how much they can achieve, even when they think they know very little.
Self-correction
Language focus: pronunciation
Level: Beginner +
Time: 10 – 15 minutes
Materials: a short text (it can be from a coursebook)
Preparation: none
Procedure:
- Ask the students to go through the text and each choose a favourite sentence. Have one of the students read their sentence aloud. Listen carefully to the whole sentence and if it has not been said near perfectly, ask the students to repeat it. Continue to ask for repetition until it is near perfect. Do not model the correct forms yourself. If the student in question, and the rest of the group, are unable to hear a particular problem then write the sentence on the board and indicate whereabouts the difficulty lies. Do not model the correct form.
- Repeat this process with half-a-dozen members of the class.
- For this correction technique to work well, a number of things are necessary:
- You should be neutral and unaggressive.
- You should treat all the students equally.
- You need to persevere – if you give up on a student before they get it right they can get extremely discouraged.
- There needs to be some trust in the group – the students need to realise that by not spoonfeeding, you are helping, not just being perverse.
Rationale:
The only real and lasting form of correction is self-correction. If you model the correct form, students can imitate the modelling and feel cosy doing this. This does not mean that they can now monitor the difference between their mistake and the correct form, nor that they will get it right next time. The above procedure can, initially, feel frustrating to some students. In the longer term it makes self-evident sense.
“Every student knows more than they think they know.”
“Every student knows much more than the teacher thinks they know.” (Gattegno)