Elsa O’Brien López

As schools adopt new methodologies such as project-based learning for teaching foreign languages, teachers can feel the need to revise their teaching techniques and strategies. Communicative teaching methods such as project-based learning can lead to a decrease in error correction as the focus is on content. This is what teachers must know to help their students make progress.

When talking about error correction, how much of it, what kind and when, seem to be the most typical questions and the most commonly answered by specialised books, articles and teaching professionals. However, surely, the million-dollar question should be: what type of error correction leads to the end error correction? 

Are some error correction techniques more effective than others in achieving correction of a mistake?

Tricky as it might seem to answer, and far from assuming we can nip the problem in the bud, extensive research has proven that different types of classes and teaching styles call for different types of error correction.

The most common error-correction techniques are:

Explicit correction: the teacher provides the correct form. E.g.: ‘It’s not buyed, it’s bought’.

Recasts: the teacher reformulates part or all of the student’s utterance without the error.

E.g.:
Student: ‘I buyed a new pencil case’
Teacher: ‘You bought a new pencil case? Can I see it?’.

Clarification requests: the teacher indicates there’s a mistake that leads to misunderstanding and asks for a reformulation.

E.g.:
Student: ‘I buyed a new pencil case’
Teacher: ‘You did what? Can you say that again?’

Metalinguistic feedback: the teacher explains why the utterance is not correct without explicitly providing the right answer. This can be used with children that are old enough to understand grammar, and with teens and adults. We shouldn’t use metalinguistic feedback or talk about grammar explicitly with early primary students as the difficulty might discourage them from learning English.

E.g.:
Student: ‘I buyed a new pencil case’
Teacher: Remember we spoke about irregular verbs and how we don’t add -ed at the end? What would be the irregular past of buy?

Elicitation: the teacher uses techniques such as completion and questions, for students to provide the correct form.

E.g.:
Student: ‘I buyed a new pencil case’
Teacher: ‘What did you do with the pencilcase?’. Let’s try to remember together: think, thought, though. So it’s buy, …. .

Repetition:  the teacher repeats the mistake while showing in some way- through intonation, facial expression, etc.- that the utterance requires correction. This could be a good technique when the learner knows what the right form is and just needs a quick reminder. The teacher must avoid making it sound like mockery but rather like complicity.

E.g.:
Student: ‘I buyed a new pencil case’
Teacher: You buyeeeed a new pencil case?!’

Very young learners don’t need to be corrected explicitly when learning a first or second language and they will eventually start using the right language through repeated natural exposure. However, as children go beyond the sensitive periods for learning a language they might sometimes need more explicit feedback to correct their mistakes. 

Since research on the teaching of English as a second language started in the 60s, teaching has evolved from more explicit grammar and translation-based methodologies to a more content or task-based approach.

Researchers Lyster and Ranta (1997) found that, in classes taught in a second language in which the focus was content, for example language classes that use project-based learning or content subjects taught in English (science, history, art), recasts were used more than any other type of feedback.

Learning a subject or carrying out projects in a foreign language is a more communicative and natural approach to language learning and therefore, teachers tend to use the most natural correction technique. Unfortunately, Lyster and Ranta observed that student uptake was less likely to occur due to recasts than other types of feedback. What is more, elicitations and metalinguistic feedback also led more frequently to the use of a corrected form.

These findings, supported by further research, seem to suggest that in content and task-based teaching, where the focus is not on form but rather on meaning, students are less likely to pick up on recasts as they might be misled into thinking the teacher is just responding to the content in the utterance rather than to its form.

Research has found that the opposite is also true. Students are more likely to notice recasts as a correction in more form-based classes. This has led researchers to propose the counterbalance hypothesis according to which, for feedback on errors to be noticed, it should differ from the instructional environment, that is, the type of teaching they are used to.

Teachers following a content-based approach and those teaching subjects through a foreign language might find these research results especially useful, and to some extent groundbreaking, as they suggest that being explicit is important during error correction even if there seems to be a consensus among the teaching community worldwide to step away from this kind of instruction in recent years.

Some tips

In order to choose the type of error correction that suits each teacher and our learners, we should be asking ourselves the following questions: 

What kind of class am I teaching? Reflecting on one’s own style of teaching is the best way to decide what type of error correction will be most effective.

What are my students’ backgrounds and specific needs? It is always useful to try and find out about our students’ backgrounds and motivations for learning at the beginning of the course. However, employing varied feedback and error correction techniques will allow us to cater for the needs of the majority of learners.

When should I correct? Although there are numerous articles that specifically address this question, it is important to give feedback throughout the whole class and not just during language-focused exchanges.  Research has shown that teachers often miss the opportunity of giving feedback during communication and class management exchanges. And very often, if there is any kind of feedback at all during these parts of the class, it tends to be in the form of recasts, which students generally notice less.

What should I correct? Acquisition of a language and error correction actually takes place in an orderly manner that is very similar to how a native speaker learns a language. This means that a majority of students will inevitably go through all the learning stages in more or less the same order, although at a slightly different pace depending on the resemblance of their mother tongue to English. 

Teachers should take into consideration a student’s natural acquisition sequence when assessing what mistakes are still acceptable as part of a student’s temporary inter-language.

Feedback can be a powerful learning tool. Teachers can make sure they give effective feedback by making success criteria clear and visible, adapting it to the learners’ needs and giving learners time and opportunities to improve using the feedback given.

To learn more about effective feedback and inclusive assessment read Inclusive assessment in the English language classroom.

To find out how to make project-based lessons more inclusive read How project-based learning can make your lessons more inclusive.