For my second critical incident I am going to write about something that happened during a peer observation. Although it didn’t take place during my class, I immediately began to reflect on it, particularly because it’s an issue that preoccupies me at present – the issue of if and when to correct.
I was observing a colleague’s class in which the focus was on revising vocabulary on the theme of the environment. There was a point in the class when the teacher was getting feedback from the students on environmental problems and possible solutions. One student was talking about deforestation and said: “We need to stop people to cut trees.”
I recall that as soon as he said it, my instinct to correct kicked in and I was fully expecting my colleague to correct the mistakes or at least one of the mistakes. The issue I heard immediately was use of the infinitive instead of -ing. Upon noting the error, I also noticed the issue of ‘cut down’ rather than ‘cut’.
While I cannot say for certain, I feel reasonably sure that I would have corrected the error with stop + -ing and possibly the error with ‘cut down’ too. My colleague chose not to. I discussed it with him afterwards and he said: “I do tend to choose my moments for correction. At some points I feel that the communication or the expression of idea is the important thing, e.g. when they’re just trying to splutter out the basic topic concepts like they were so I don’t like to interrupt the flow by correcting them at times like that. Their brain is too busy with just getting the idea out. At other times like a run-though of answers or reporting of discussion feedback, then I will pick them up on errors.”
I reflected upon this philosophy and it is very logical. Students make a lot of errors, particularly at the level of this class, which is roughly IELTS 4.5. There are many issues to consider. Firstly, is it an error with the target language? In this case, the teacher was revising vocabulary on environmental problems such as plastic pollution, climate change, global warming and discussing solutions. The phrases ‘stop people from doing something’ and ‘cut down trees’ were certainly relevant to the discussion but were not specifically the vocabulary that was being reviewed.
Secondly, is the correction best made immediately or noted down to return to at another time? This was a discussion rather than written work and students were brainstorming ideas spontaneously, so it wasn’t the best time to correct.
Thirdly, how simple is the error correction? This was a key point for me. In the case of ‘stop someone from doing something’, it is not purely as simple as explaining preposition + -ing because the verb ‘stop’ in fact has different meanings depending on use of to or -ing (stop to do something is the interruption of an action). I realised that a correction would probably need a lengthy explanation, which would interrupt the class.
This incident was particularly noteworthy for me because I feel I have a tendency to over-correct. I am naturally better with higher levels of English and haven’t taught elementary level for many years. When working with higher intermediate to advanced level learners who are learning English for Academic Purposes, correction is important because students are honing their English rather than learning basic structures and usually value correction highly. But when dealing with intermediate level, there is a wide range of errors that crop up. The teacher simply cannot correct them all, so needs to be selective. Over-correction can definitely have a negative impact on student motivation – if the teacher corrects a lot, students may be reluctant to volunteer to answer. This of course needs to be balanced with the need to point out student errors that inhibit communication.
Returning to the error itself – “stop people to cut trees.” – in the context of a discussion of solutions to deforestation, it’s unlikely a listener would misinterpret that the student was talking about someone who would stop what they were doing in order to to cut trees. Nor would a listener be likely to question whether the people were pruning trees rather than actually cutting them down, so neither error was likely to inhibit understanding.
I’m pondering the issue of correction of gerunds and infinitives at present, having done a presentation for Language Awareness class on the issue. I came to the conclusion that it’s very rare for mistakes in gerunds and infinitives to result in misunderstanding. Having spent many classes going through the rules of these constructions and indeed testing students on which verbs take gerunds or infinitives, I am now questioning the ‘focus on forms’. Surely the paramount concern is being understood, and therefore there should be less emphasis on correction of errors where this is the case.
From now on, I’m going to take that split second when I hear a spoken error to consider more carefully whether correction is necessary. It’s an important issue to keep in mind.
