Activity 1 Examining statements about mistakes Objective: to explore students’ perceptions of mistakes
Time: 20 min
Materials: handout 1
Procedure:
- ☺(5 min) Ask participants to examine a few statements about mistakes and choose one which they most strongly agree with. Distribute handout 1 to each participant.
- ☺☺☺ (5 min) Put participants in groups of 4-5 and ask them to discuss their views for 4-5 minutes before reporting back to the whole group.
- ☺(8 min) Invite a spokesperson from each group to comment on their discussion.
- ☺(2 min) Say that there is no one ‘right’ way of dealing with mistakes. Suggest that teachers should be able to recognise different kinds of mistakes and deal with them in a way that supports students’ own language learning efforts. State that the next activity will focus on types of mistake.
Activity 2 Watching English lessons Objective: to explore types of mistakes and the ways of dealing with them
Time: 25 min
Materials: video
►Procedure:
☺(1 min) Tell participants that they are going to watch a fragment of student’s speech and that their task is to notice the mistakes the student makes and think about the causes of and differences between these mistakes.
- (1 min 40 sec). Play the clip of a girl talking about her favourite book.
- ☺(7 min) Invite random responses from the group about the mistakes they have noticed and their causes. Ask participants to identify examples of mistakes which show that the student is actually learning – i.e. when she knows the rule but applies it wrongly (e.g. forms like ‘thinked’* – showing that the student knows how to make verbs in the past (adding ‘–ed’), but doesn’t know (some) irregular verbs.)
- ☺(1 min) Tell participants that they are going to watch two fragments of English lessons and that their task is to notice how the teachers deal with the mistakes their students make. Ask them to consider why the teachers behaved in this way, what mistakes they corrected, when and how.
- (3 min) Play two short fragments of different English lessons (Nodira – peer correction, Alex – teacher correction).
-☺(5min) Ask participants about the differences between each teacher’s approaches to correcting students’ mistakes. Invite several responses. Discuss the attitude behind each approach and refer back to the statements about mistakes (see Activity 1).
- ☺(6 min) Ask participants to identify particular examples of correcting students’ mistakes from the video and discuss which of them allowed more space for learners to think and self-correct and which were more top-down. Ask participants to consider the reasons for these differences.