Distinguish between three main categories of errors

1. Those which lead to misunderstanding or breakdown of communication - caused by:

o translation

confusing grammatical patterns too long or complex sentences too short sentences

2. Lesser but often irritating errors -

o wrong tense

o non-agreement

o word order

o articles omitted or misused

o spelling mistakes

o punctuation

3. Stylistic errors - inappropriate style formal/informal, wrong register.

Samples of students' writing:

1. Poor grammar: I has driven to London shopping. In the afternoon I come back, and I've eaten anything, after this I went tio a pub. At 11 o'clock I went home in my bed.

2. Poor graphical skills - letters aren't vertical enough: He coming from Airport Hintero by Train to Prighton From ppighton to my flat by taxi I have flat near school. I walking from my flat to school.

3. Poor spelling & punctuation - I give you Some instrustions how to get to my adreas or my place You can comeing from heathrou airport to victory station buy anderGraon and after you can comeing by trian to Hove.

4. Direct translation - I'm very pleasant for me that you spend some days with me in my town, but you needn't go to a hotel, I think is much better that you go to my house. The form easier to get there is that you take a taxi, and indicate my address.

A positive correction strategy firstly depends on the approach or approaches which underlie the planning of the programme.

It is not too difficult to anticipate some of the problem areas - the structures, functions, areas of pronunciation which cause general problems to individual students (L1 backgrounds). An entry test will confirm many of our pre-suppositions.

Having anticipated these problem areas, we must decide whether to adopt a behaviourist approach (steering round errors - simplicity, minimal steps, reinforcement of correct utterances) or whether to draw our learners into these danger areas (Dakin)

I am influenced by both theories in my selection of materials - the value of consolidation through repetition is not overlooked. Many students (e.g. Germans) demand the rules! Lessons are a forum for better knowledge of the language system. Cognitive!

When and what to correct pre-supposes a system of priorities. If I have just presented a new piece of language and my aim is that students produce and practise it fairly accurately, I'm likely to correct more immediately than if I am monitoring practice in free production. Accuracy v Fluency hats. If a mistake is likely to hinder comprehension or lead students into further errors (especially if it is based on a fundamental misconception) then it gets corrected.

It could be discouraging to pounce on "slips of the tongue" or lapses resulting from lack of thinking-time. If students learn by successive approximation, some balance between giving them time for self-correction & evaluation and deliberately earmarking their mistakes must be achieved. The earmarking of mistakes, however, is a duty which the teacher must not ignore. I owe the students feedback. The Yes/No Right/Wrong True/False function of the teacher. Divergeance in T & students' attitudes:

Neither the behaviourist or cognitive strategies of correction will succeed unless something tells the students that a mistake has been made. (Ts following communicatively based programmes are justifiably reluctant to deal with each and every error).

How to correct or earmark a mistake:

1. Pure repetition of the right answer = the behaviourist's way, but does not encourage students to think about the meaning of the utterance they have incorrectly made.

2. Reference to a picture provides a good context for correcting lexis.

3. spatial relations - time lines using the whiteboard or OHP.

4. Clocks with moveable hands

5. Cuisenaire rods, systematically used to prompt the insertion or omission of auxiliary verbs, concord, use of articles, countable and uncountable nouns

6. Facial gestures, counting on fingers, arm movements, hand signals, mime, use of nearby furniture (e.g. "on" "under" "in") and visual aids all contribute to this inventory of correctives.

In many ways, the use of the above as correctives shadows their use in the presentation phase. This time the visual aids act as memory joggers and the students remember the correct linguistic forms associated with them.

There are also linguistic correction techniques:

1. Long utterances can be broken down into phrases, words and syllables through backchaining or frontchaining. They are then resynthesized.

2. Asking the student's peer something similar and then return to the student.

If I am uncertain about what mistakes my students are making, teaching through testing may help in the diagnosis. Written dictation is both a test of listening comprehension and sometimes a guide to errors students are making in their own production (e.g. writing).

For positive correction of written work at these levels, it is necessary to recognise what is good as well as what is bad. For example, at the intemediate level, real beginnings in connected writing, a few compound sentences etc) would be worthy of praise.

At the elementary level, correct transformations, subject verb agreements, the correct choice of present tense and even correct copying could be earmarked as "good".

Use a correction scheme and illustrate it by getting students to proof-read faulty scripts.

For positive correction organised records on the part of both teacher & students are desirable. Provide all learners with a (written) KEY to the scheme before you set assignments which are to be corrected. Do not tell them about it retrospectively, as they will see you as someone who is always 'changing the goalposts'.

Adopt a correction scheme and illustrate it by getting students to do some correcting of a sample of work illustrating:

1. poor selection

2. incorrect word order

3. unnecessary addition

4. omission

5. grammatical mistake

6. poor punctuation

7. spelling mistake

Avoid the trap of using corrections of students' written work as the basis of a monologue which becomes all too large a part of their next lesson.

Critical ability on the students' part is probably better developed through self-correction and discussion in pairs or small groups and through comparison of two or more pieces of writing.

4 вопрос Warm things up; starting with an effective English warm-up activity. Begin with a fun, simple warm-up activity or game to relax your students, establish a group dynamic and get everyone ready to speak English. (Discourage the use of other languages from the very beginning of your lesson.). Use your warm-up as an opportunity to get students mixing with one another, and keep it short and sweet. Five minutes is enough for a one hour class. 10 minutes is OK for 90 minutes or more. Don’t worry a great deal about correcting your students as they warm up.

EFL Lesson planning; presentation, practice & production.Your EFL class should include the “three Ps”: presentation, practice and production. They should usually be covered in this order. Presentation is the introduction of new vocabulary and structures. This is the first part of your class. You should chorus new vocabulary as many times as necessary and iron out any pronunciation problems. Remember that some of the material may not be new to all of your students. Try to elicit the meaning of words first and then “teach” them only if necessary. If a keen student can tell the class the meaning of a given word, then have them do so. When checking that your class understands, don’t assume that simply asking them “Do you understand?” will be enough. Think of some questions to ask students, to have them demonstrate their understanding. Concept-checking questions can be difficult to adlib, so include them in your plan. Closed questions can be OK if necessary. Based on our previous example, “I earn $10 dollars a day. Can I afford a new car?” will probably be sufficient. Next, students will need to practice what they have been taught. Practice should begin in a fairly controlled way; pair-practicing dialogues (from textbooks or the whiteboard), substituting certain words for others is a classic technique. Fill-in-the-blanks-exercises, or activities in which students assemble sentences from cut-out strips of paper, are good ways to set-up controlled practice activities. Games which require the repetition of key structures are useful too. Once students have had some time to practice some correctly formed structures or vocabulary, you can start to broaden out the activities. Freer practice allows students some opportunities for personalization. Have them use their own information or their imaginations, while making use of the cues still provided for them. During the practice phase, you should correct whenever necessary. The production phase is when students no longer have the structures and vocabulary in front of them. Broaden the topic and have them chat freely. Encourage conversations to wander off topic. Have students speak in pairs or small groups and ensure that students mingle beyond their usual friendship circles. Monitor discussions and be prepared to teach new vocabulary to help students express themselves. If you want to correct students at this point, you can either do so on the spot, or periodically bring the class back together as one, and use the whiteboard to correct in front of everyone.

That’s a Wrap; Ending your EFL class with an effective wrap-up.Keep an eye on your timing so that you have around three to five minutes to wrap up your lesson. Wrap-ups stop classes from ending abruptly. They also provide a chance to praise your students and do some final comprehension checks at the end. Do a quick, easy “test”, designed to set your students up for success, so that they end the lesson feeling good about their efforts and the class as a whole. Check for questions at the end and say goodbye.

10 вопрос Inductive and Deductive. Inductive is known as a 'bottom up' approach. In other words, students discovering grammar rules while working through exercises. For example: A reading comprehension which includes a number of sentences describing what a person has done up to that period in time. After doing the reading comprehension, the teacher could begin to ask questions such as: How long has he done this or that? Has he ever been to Paris? etc. and then follow with When did he go to Paris? To help the students inductively understand the difference between the simple past and the present perfect, these questions could be followed with which questions spoke about a definite time in the past? Which questions asked about the person's general experience? Deductive is known as a 'top down' approach. This is the standard teaching approach that has a teacher explaining rules to the students. For example: The present perfect is made up of the auxiliary verb 'have' plus the past participle. It is used to express an action which has begun in the past and continues into the present moment... etc. I personally feel that a teacher needs in the first place to facilitate learning. That is why I prefer to provide students with inductive learning exercises. However, there are certainly moments when the teacher needs to explain grammar concepts to the class. Generally, I recommend the following class structure when teaching grammar skills:

· Begin with an exercise, game, listening, etc. that introduces the grammar concept.

· Ask students questions that will help them identify the grammar concept to be discussed.

· Follow with another exercise that more specifically focuses on the grammar concept, but takes an inductive approach. This could be a reading exercise with questions and responses in the structure that is being taught.

· Check responses, ask students to explain the grammar concept that has been introduced.

· At this point introduce teaching explanations as a way of clearing up misunderstandings.

· Provide an exercise which focuses on the correct construction of the grammar point. This could be an exercise such as a fill the gap, cloze or tense conjugation activity.

· Ask students to once again explain the concept.

As you can see, the teacher is facilitating students to do their own learning rather than using the 'top down' approach of dictating rules to the class. The above-mentioned criteria for creditable PG rules are particularly relevant to deductive (rule-driven, top-down) teaching, which leads from an explicit presentation of metalinguistic information, the provision of a set of abstractions, isolated language rules at autonomous levels of description subsequently accompanied by model sentences, to their application to concrete L₂ representations and practice tasks only after the clarification has been studied and digested (Komorowska 1993:120). This technique simply means providing learners with the ready grammar rule, describing en détail how the new structure is formed, what its components are, and in what type of context it can be used. All the information is given in the form of a mini-lecture, during which the teacher usually employs grammatical terminology. After the explanation, the learners are provided with examples illustrating the new structure, which they analyse, and are subsequently asked to apply the rule to new sentences. They are typically expected to memorise the rule (and relevant ‘exceptions’). This form of teaching offers a clear clarification of new language items, which makes the learning task easier and less intimidating and is time-effective, leaving more time for practising the new structures. Among other advantages,

It gets straight to the point, and therefore can be time-saving.
It respects the intelligence and maturity of many – especially adult – students and acknowledges the role of cognitive processes in language acquisition. …
It confirms many students’ expectations about classroom learning.
This type of teaching is prevalent in the majority of traditional educational institutions. The teacher may, however, also go for inductive (Socratic, rule-discovery, bottom-up) teaching, rejecting the idea of giving the learners a ready-made rule. Rather than explicitly telling them off the bat what the rule is, s/he may supply them with carefully selected intelligible linguistic data in context, usually in the form of a text illustrating the use of the particular grammatical structure. The learners’ mission in this guided discovery technique with properly devised questions is to try, on the basis of the model, to arrive at some generalisation that accounts for the underlying regularities in the data and to formulate their own explanation of the rules governing the material presented. The elicited students’ rules will then, if necessary, be amended and corrected by the teacher, and the language structure practised.^[2] Following Stern (1992:150), we can represent the deductive and inductive sequences schematically in the following way:^[3]

deductive approach: General rule → Specific examples → Practice

inductive approach: Specific examples → Practice → General rule

Tell me and I forget,
Teach me and I remember,
Involve me and I learn.

14 вопрос Mistakes, when attention is called to them, can be self-corrected. An error cannot be self-corrected, while mistakes can be self-corrected if the deviation is pointed out to the speaker.

Sometimes. If, on one or two occasions, an English learner says "John cans sing," but on other occasions says "John can sing," it is difficult to determine whether "cans" is a mistake or an error. If, however, further examination of the learner's speech consistently reveals such utterances as "John wills go; "John mays come," and so forth, with very few instances of correct third-person singular usage of modal auxiliaries, you might safely conclude that "cans," "mays," and other such forms are errors indicating that the learner has not distinguished modals from other verbs. But it is possible, because of the few correct instances of production of this form, that the learner is on the verge of making the necessary differentiation between the two types of verbs.

Errors—overt manifestations of learners' systems—arise from several possible general sources: interlingual errors of interference from the native lan­guage, intralingual errors within the target language, the sociolinguistic context of communication, psycholinguistic or cognitive strategies, and no doubt countless affective variables.

interlingual transfer is a significant source of errorfor all learners. The beginning stages of learning a second language are especially vulnerable to interlingual transfer from the native language, or interference. In these early stages, before the system of the second language is familiar, the native language is the only previous linguistic system upon which the learner can draw. We have all heard English learners say "sheep" for "ship," or "the book of Jack" instead of "Jack's book"; French learners may say "Je sais Jean" for "Je connais Jean," and so forth. All these errors art attributable to negative interlingual transfer. While it is not always clear that an error is the result of transfer from the native language, many such errors are detectable in learner speech. Fluent knowledge or even famil­iarity with a learner's native language of course aids the teacher in detecting and analyzing such errors.

We also frequently observe syntactic and lexical errors persisting in the speech of those who have learned a language quite well. The relatively permanent incorporation of incorrect linguistic forms into a person's second language competence has been referred to as fossilization. Fossilization is a normal and natural stage for many learners, and should not be viewed as some sort of terminal illness, in spite of the forbidding metaphor that suggests an unchangeable situation etched in stone.

the process of freezing matter at very low tem peratures

fossilization could be the result of the presence or absence of internal motivating factors, of seeking interaction with other people, of consciously focusing on forms, and of one's strategic investment in the learning process. As teachers, we may, and rightly, attach great impor­tance to the feedback we give to students, but we must recognize that there are other forces at work in the process of internalizing a second language.

16 вопрос Self-correction Always give the students the chance to correct themselves. If they are going to become more accurate they must learn to monitor themselves. They may have just made a slip and will welcome the opportunity to put it right. Sometimes they need some assistance from you in knowing where the mistake is and what kind of mistake it is, before they can self-correct.