Unit 1: How am I doing?

Sometimes I feel like a broken record, but as always, the first step, for all teaching and learning is to create a supportive, encouraging learning environment. One of the keys to successful L2 learning lies in the feedback that a learner receives from others (Brown and Lee, p. 380). So by creating a classroom where error treatment is seen as a part of learning, our students will be receptive to give and receive feedback to further their growth as L2 speakers.The time and place of the treatment is important and varies according to the situation. How I would correct a student, or have peers correct a student would be dependent on the format e.g. pair work, a formal presentation, formative or summative assessments. I like to take into consideration what James Hendrickson (1980) refers to as, global and local errors. Local errors do not need to be corrected immediately because they don't interfere with the message.  A global error means that the meaning is impeded and those should be corrected early on so that they don't occur on a consistent basis.

P. 383 in Brown and Lee has a great chart (included in my resources section) that shows a model for treatment of classroom speech errors. One of my more preferred methods of correction is recasting, in which you use the correct form back to the speaker, "So you went to the store." (In this case the student said, "I goed to the store").
I think all learners want corrective feedback, we just have to find the right opportunity to provide it.

Brown, D. and Lee, H. (2015). Teaching by principles: An interactive approach to language pedagogy (4th ed. revised).

Hendrickson, J. (1980). Error correction in foreign language teaching: Recent theory, research, and practice. In K. Croft (Ed.)l, Readings on English as a second language (2^nd ed., pp. 153-173). Cambridge, MA: Winthrop