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Humanising Language Teaching
Year 5; Issue 3; May 03
Individualising Correction
Time: a whole period or double period
Purpose: to make correction fully interpersonal and to take correction out of the group process.
Preparation: read through student homework compositions and make notes on
a separate sheet of paper of four or five things you would like to go
into with each writer. These may be things you don't understand,
these may be unEnglish mistakes, unwanted ambiguity, clumsy
expression or unclear thinking.
There will also be lines that surprise you with their excellence,
phrases you had no idea this person knew, examples of the freshness of
non-native writing. These are also to be noted down.
Lesson Outline:
- Set the students a task , like an autonomous writing exercise or grammar revision or work in the computer room for which they do not need you.
- Work in turn with each student on the points in their composition that struck you.
Variation: Instead of working with individual students on written texts, ask a student to monologue to you on a subject of their choice for 10 minutes. Write down phrases that need correction or embellishment, or phrases where you guess the student has only one way of saying this. Also write down excellent phrases.
Go through your notes with the student. Some people are much more open to correction in a one-to-one situation than in front of 25 others. Keep the one-to-one session down to 15 minutes.
Note: The tradition that nearly all feedback on written work should be in writing is a bizarre one. Doesn't the teacher need the feedback of student reaction to the correction?
Acknowledgement: Karl Preis, a Viennese secondary school teacher, told us about his system of not marking homework, but of giving it back to his students with individual, oral comments in breaktimes and over the lunch break.
