Classroom Observations - Error Management (26-30)

Error Management

In this section of my observation, I paid attention to the error management and corrections that the teacher gave to the students, how and when she did and the impact that this had on the students overall. In general, errors are very different and widespread across the different grades and levels, but here are some that I paid closer attention to and noticed occurring more commonly.

Pronunciation: One of the most common errors that I have seen from students in general is based on pronunciation. This is always something that is a large issue and has to be monitored and checked throughout as fossilization can happen a lot within these types of errors, especially when it comes to the older classes and sentence formations. Pronunciation corrections also depend on what words need to be corrected and at what stage in the lesson. Keywords can be corrected by having the class repeat after the teacher multiple times to get the correct sounds. An example of this happened with the word “umbrella”, it was something that some of the students struggled with pronouncing, so the teacher made them all repeat the word a few times until everyone had gotten it correctly. In other cases, it can be important to emphasise the correct pronunciation of words individually when the words are important and often repeated. This doesn’t happen as often but can sometimes be necessary, especially with the older classes. 

Some phrases that I heard the teacher use in order to enforce the correct pronunciation were “together” (everyone repeats the words together) and “again” (to practice and check if they understood the words), the same goes for the word “since” and “one more time”. Another common phrase that the teacher used throughout the lesson was “use English” when the students defaulted to Polish. 

Countable Vs Uncountable: Another issue i had witnessed in a grade 3 class was the confusion between countable and uncountable words. This was more of a mistake that the teacher had noticed from the very beginning when asking concept-checking questions and so was able to review it as a whole class from the beginning multiple times. While it was clear that the activity was meant to last much shorter, the teacher found it necessary to go over the vocabulary a second and third time in order to get the students to practise it. After that activity, the teacher emphasised it and monitored peer activities, while keeping the issue in mind and checking the self and peer corrections in this way. Through this, the students were able to think about their errors and fix them throughout the lesson.

One other issue that I observed in a grade 6 class was the understanding of grouped words with different meanings. One of which was “Fall out with someone”. With this, the teacher asked the students if they knew what it meant and, luckily, they knew that it related to a disagreement rather than physically “falling out”, however, it was a necessary question to ask and understanding to check. This similar situation happened with the phrases “close” (“close the door” or “nearby”) and “setting” (“computer setting” or “setting sun”). 

In conclusion, errors and error corrections are all situation-dependent, while it is most common and often better to correct errors at the end and as a whole, sometimes it is necessary to mention more direct problems individually if it has a detrimental effect on the student’s language skills.