Praising The Learners
I am very pleased with your work
That is very good!
Well done
That is excellent!
No that is not right (negative)
Will someone else try?
That is almost right-try again
Good!
How Do we correct English
You can ask a question and the learner makes a mistake. How can you correct the learner?
Here are three ways of correcting. What is good about each of them? What is not so good about each of them?
Good/Not so good:-
Correct the learner yourself.
Ask the leaner to correct his/ her own error.
Ask another leaner for the right answer.
Here are something to say when you correct learners.
That ‘s not correct.
Can anyone say what is correct ?
That is almost right.
Try again
No, that is not right. Will someone else try?
When we do correct errors
think about a typical classroom situation for you number of learners are there, age,level, teaching space, etc.....
Look at the statements in the table below and mark what you think.
I totally agree / I partially agree/ totally disagree
The teacher should always correct the learners’ mistakes
The teacher should correct at the all stages of the lesson
Learner should learn from their errors.
The best person to correct learners’ errors is the teacher.
Correcting all the time can have a negative effect on the learning.
Teachers need to think which errors are important and which are not.
There are times in one lesson when we should correct a lot, and times when we shouldn't correct at all.
Variety of elicitation & explanation techniques are used, including
1) Use of context 2) enactment 3) illustration
There is also a variety of correction techniques, including both covert and overt types It is between 95% and 85% comprehensible. However, I believe there are also certain conditions in regard to the para-verbal features of teacher-talk. When the teacher talks, she or he maintains eye contact with as many members of the class as possible. The teacher uses eye-contact and body movement to give emphasis and invite participation (prolonged gaze at different leaner between some sentences to invite comment, gestures to help explain language, etc.)
The question of 'authenticity':-There is one last question I would like to raise. - or rather, there are two.How 'authentic' does teacher-talk have to be? Have we not been told that the only way to prepare leaner for authentic language is to expose them from the very start to 'authentic language'. Taken literally, this would mean that we should always talk to our leaner, even if they are real beginners, in exactly the same way we talk to fellow native-speakers. This is what I understand the be the radical 'hard' version of the theory that people learn to engage in authentic discourse outside the classroom only be being engaged in completely 'authentic' language' inside the classroom. This seems to me also to raise questions about the usefulness of classrooms and formal teaching in any other field as well as about the meaning of the word 'authentic', but I will come to that in a moment.
There is a kind of unwritten rule in all 'normal' discourse - if you accept that something like normal discourse not only exists but is frequently engaged in - that the speaker or speakers make concessions to the people they are speaking to or with. They try, as far as possible, to use language they think the others will understand. They also use various rhetorical devices to focus on information they assume the others may not be aware of. Good writers are supposed to do this, as well. If you are writing an article on about Microsoft Word for Macintosh for people who have not used Microsoft Word before, the language of the article will be significantly different in many ways from the language of an article for experienced users of this word-processing programme. It is not just a question of information but also of language. If you don't know what a style sheet is, you explain the concept first. And in order to do this, you try to use non-technical language first. In other words, authentic language varies considerably in style and content so that the people for whom it is intended will understand it. Parents use a reduced form of language called 'motherese' to speak to their children. The language of a pilot talking to a non-pilot is different from the language a pilot uses to talk to a pilot. And so on.The implication of this is that any definition of 'authentic' must depend to a considerable extent on the question 'authentic for whom?' This is as true for us as teachers as it is for anybody else. We can and should try to use naturalistic English as far a s possible. But this naturalistic English is bound to be influenced by the obvious fact that we are not using it with possessors of the full native-speaker code. Classrooms and the uses and limitations of formal teaching.I cannot help feeling sometimes that classrooms and formal teaching -styles are not very effective vehicles for the learning of languages or anything else. Classrooms suffer from some very obvious limitations. They do not and cannot offer the same natural profusion of daily occurrences that life in the streets outside offer. This is both a limitation and a strength. Because of their apparent sensory monotony, they make it possible to focus on only one or several things at a time. They are, at best 'sheltered environments' and offer opportunities not only for 'uninhibited' but also for sheltered practice.If language-teaching fails because it is limited by some of these natural 'sheltered' constraints, then so does any other form of teaching in any other classroom for any other subject. I believe - intuitively believe - that good teachers have never succeeded in teaching well by ignoring the fact that they are teaching in classrooms. In a way, good teachers are like good actors. I say 'in a way' because I don't want in any way to confuse good teaching with good acting. There are certain similarities but there are also enormous differences and I am -after almost forty years of teaching -enormously ware of the differences. So I don't want to leave you with the impression that I am confusing in any way these two things. What, however, is the one most obvious way in which they are similar?