Approaches to teaching language systems for communication

Receptive errors

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  Students may mis-process input and give the wrong response.
  

One way of dealing with errors:

Ask for repetition: this signals you aren’t sure of what the student has said and gives them the opportunity to self-correct if it is a slip. It also gives you thinking time! (I.e. time to decide how to deal with the error)

Ask for self-correction: students may have missed your previous cue or attempted to self-correct but not corrected the error.

Ask the rest of the class to try and help: this engages all students in what started as a one-to-one interaction and maximizes on the different developmental stages and sub-levels that are present within a single class.

If nobody can help: either give up and provide the answer or give prompts that may help students to reach the answer. (Worth remembering that you can’t elicit what students don’t know and considering whether the benefits of laboring over a particular error balance out the amount of time spent.)