To err is human or my thoughts on error correction
In June, I went to a great seminar on error correction in ELT conducted by Eva Kartchava , who is doing research in this area. As a warm-up, she gave us 5 questions she was going to cover and asked us to discuss them in pairs. My discussion partner turned out to be a “personal broadcaster”- she turned to me and started talking with total disregard to what the questions were, what I had to say, and whether I was even listening. Since I didn’t get a chance to speak then, I want to speak now. In this post, I want to finally answer Eva’s questions and talk about the way I deal with error correction. 1 Should errors be corrected? Yes. Uncorrected mistakes grow into fossilized errors which are virtually impossible to weed out. That said, not all errors and not always. Which brings me to questions 2 and 3. 2 When should learners’ errors be corrected? Errors can be corrected either immediately or after the speaking activity. The downside of the former is that the teacher has to bre...