ERROR CORRECTION AND ASSESSMENT IN ELT

Errors and mistakes are part of our lives, we know that everybody make mistakes and errors, nevertheless what is really important is learning from those errors and never repeat them over and over.

Student’s evidences in oral or writing activities are what we as teachers have in order to emit an effective concept about his/her development, however we have to take into account that our concept can be productive or destructive to students and if you do not know how correct their errors or mistakes, they could understand in a bad way and this situation could finished with terrible consequences.

Teachers cannot be too permissive or too exigent with students, they need to act according to their goals, and on the other hand teachers have to taking into account that the ways to do something are very important to the mental development of their students.

The appropriate way to correct and feedback to the student’s activities and the others academic labors are just the work that we as a teacher must to learn because the ogre and dictatorial teacher is old-fashion and totally useless in our new educational context.

After that short introduction, I just can think in a strategy question, when and how should we correct our students? Perhaps every teacher have several and different views about that and also different ways to correcting their students, but what we need is to find a method in order to feel comfortable both, teachers and their students.

Lightbown & Spada (1999:16)

There are many types of feedback that teachers can give the students, when they make an error; Thornburn, Brown, William and Nassaji suggest to the teachers in the recompilation to their papers in the book of Elizabeth A. Grassi and Heidi Bulmhan Barker (2010), Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Exceptional Students, the following important error correction strategies:

• Clarification requests: these are requests that ask students to repeat or restate what they had said.

• Recasting, modeling, or reformulating: This is where the teachers repeat what the students said, but in a grammatically correct form and in a manner that does not disrupt the conversation.

• Metalinguistic feedback or elicitation: This kind of feedback encourages students to focus on the specific area where the error occurred and gives the students grammatical clues.

• Explicit correction: The teacher stops the students and explicitly corrects the error.

• Future reference: The teachers write down the errors for future reference to be taught in a grammar mini-lesson later. The teacher postpones the feedback so as not to disrupt the flow of the conversation.

• Teachable moment: This is where the teacher provides explicit mini-lessons at the time that the error occurs. The teacher uses the students’ error to instruct the class on the rules of the specific grammar point.

Whatever kind of strategy that we choose is good, what is really important and relevant is identify the error and classify it into a logical group and select the most appropriate way to correct the students, and we never have to forget that all strategies of correction are not good in any context.

As a conclusion, I have to say that error correction is a very important point in the learning-teaching process, and we as a teachers cannot omit several individual factors which can be relevant when teachers are correcting their students such as individual preferences, level of the students, aptitude, motivation, learning styles and strategies, which are important information for teachers in order to improve the learning process. Therefore, we should consider the role of communication as one of the most important things in English Language Teaching, and in the same way we have to permit to students take the risk to make errors and correct them with the advises of the teacher.

Whatever thing that we can do by our students, we have to do it professionally and consciously, and that is because in the life as in the work, we have a lot of time to do bad things, but just an opportunity to do the correct one. What I want to say is that we as a teachers need to be aware about any concept that we could emit concerning to the students, and it is not a secret that without a good plan of the teachers to evaluate and assess the students, they could not have evidences to emit an actual concept about the students’ development.

ABOUT ASSESSMENT

Assessment and evaluation are another preoccupation in what we know like English language teaching (ELT), because it is not easy for teachers, tutors, couches, professors, or any other person charge in teaching. They have to take into account several things like the level of the students, the sector or context of students and everything that you should know about students before plan your lessons. Jim Cummins and Chris Davison (2007) wrote in their book about assessment the following interesting words;

Assessment and evaluation judgments have usually been delivered long after the event, formulated in often mysterious and non-negotiable terms, with a heavy reliance on technical terminology and statistics. As a consequence, assessment and evaluation have always been taken for granted in ELT, but often misunderstood by practitioners, rarely included as a component in English language teacher training, and never really challenged by key stake-holders.

There are many things that teachers need to know about evaluation, and I am going to resume what we have to know before evaluate in the following questions in order to have a general idea about it; why they are going to evaluate? What is the reason to evaluate? What are the topics to evaluate? Which kind of evaluation are you going to apply?
Those are some kind of questions that we cannot omit before plan the classes, if we as teachers are not able to find the answer of those questions, perhaps we and our learners will waste a lot of money and time, in others words without a plan is impossible to do the teaching-learning process.
As Derek Rowntree (1992, p203) said, evaluation is the key to improving the quality of your learners’ learning. The evolution of evaluation and assessment in a different way which we are accustomed to see them is our challenge and duty. Schools in which people are more interesting in administration than academic, generally evaluation and assessment of their students and college are incomplete and improvised and it is what we could see few years ago and at the present time in some questioned schools.

Assessment and evaluation through observing may be the most used and effective method to emit a judge about what students has learned during the course and the different activities development in their classes. Ruth wajnryb (1992), comments how classroom observation has often been perceived judgmental terms of assessment, evaluation or experimentation. She add that assessment and evaluation through observing the classroom are still an integral part of many teachers training programmes around the world and are deemed useful, especially where it is thought that the trainee might benefit from the evaluation and feedback of a more experienced teacher or trainer.

And according to John Garden (2006), assessment for learning has come to play a significant role in learning and teaching, and the assessment reform group has played a pivotal role in this change. In order to emit an effective assessment to the students is very important to take into account that students as human being are subjective and they can express what they know and feel in several ways to act, and for that reason teachers have to plan their lesson and search a strategy to interpret the students’ knowledge in order to emit a real assessment.

REFERENCES

Jim Cummins and Chris Davison (2007), International handbook of English Language Teaching, Springer US.

Elizabeth A. Grassi and Heidi Bulmhan Barker (2010), Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Exceptional Students, SAGE publication, Inc.

Wajnryb Ruth (1992), Classroom observation task, Cambridge University Press.
Rowntree Derek (1992), Explorer open and distance learning, Routledge Falmer.

Classrooms are not just four walls

Keeping the order of the classroom is one of the most important and difficult roles that teachers must confront in the hard labor to teach. Somebody can think that just young teachers with few experiences should pay special attention in classroom management because old and wise teachers are able to face the most difficulties with their groups and they never have been any transcendental problems with them because of their experiences. Perhaps the situation at the majority of the schools where the number of students surpasses the capacity of the classrooms, the chairs and their location is not comfortable, the boards on the walls are small, dirty, damaged or old, the classrooms are too hot or too cold or the students are violent and dangerous, we must have a good plan to face those troubles and others that is possible to appear into our classrooms.

This topic is including into the classroom management and it has been discussed by several authors. In order to clarify what I am going to try in this essay, from now on there are some words by Lisa Rodriguez, PH. D. (2010) who said about management that it refers to issues of supervision, refereeing, facilitating, and even academic discipline. She also said that not all student behaviors require intervention or confrontation while some are serious enough in nature to warrant formal disciplinary action.
About classroom management, I am not going to take into account the untold number of strategies, recommendations and experience that wise teachers or expert people in education have been writing the last years. For that reason, what I am going to attempt some general and important things that we cannot pass over when we talk about classroom management.

Now I want to talk about a hypothetical situation in an unreal official school, which has been taken from several circumstances that I had the opportunity to see in my university practices and in my job as a teacher in different official and private schools.
That official school is located at the countryside, in a remote place where cars and buses cannot arrive easily; students go to school by feed crossing some kilometers with nothing into their stomach, some of them do not have adequate clothes to study, neither good shoes to walk comfortably. At the class, students cannot pay attention to the class because they are hungry and tired because they had to work the last night, also they do not have any motivation and orientation to study. The teacher is an angry man that shouts the students all the time. He never has time to hear his students or answer their questions, he always uses the same book and the same marker which replenishes every day to write on the white board and fill it time after time.

In that hypothetical situation, in which we can find a lot of coincidences with the schools that we know, there are many things that we could do with a good plan translated in what we called “Classroom management”. However who is charged of this work? How can we capacitate to develop an effective change? Is it easy or difficult to apply? Are good classroom managers born or made? I could find a good answer to those questions in the words of Robert J. Marzano (2003), which said in his book that:

Good classroom manager are teachers who understand and use specific techniques. Awareness of and training in this techniques can change teacher behavior, which in turn change students behavior and ultimately affects students achievement positively. After that he said that individual classroom teachers can have a major impact on student achievement. Then he finished his intervention saying that on the three roles of the classroom teacher-making choice about instrumental strategies, designing classroom curriculum and employing classroom management techniques-classroom management is arguably the foundation.

We cannot beginning the classes at the school without a general plan in which we must take into account a lot of relevant things of their context like the place where students are going to have their classes, the number of the students, a previous lesson plan, personal knowledge about students and their families, occupation of their parents, the level of students, their weaknesses and fortresses, likes and dislikes and of course our best attitude to teach and work.

According to D Adrienne Johnson (2007) the academic is very important, but you must first an environment that is conducive to learning and learning will not occur until the environment is conductive to learning. For this reason, I have to continue defending the plan of the teacher before start classes.

After organization and plan, what students need are some rules according to the teacher’s goal; the rules of the classroom do not have to be the same for all teachers and they should elaborate them according to the kind of activities. As I said, it depends to the results of the teacher’s investigation about the context of their students and for this reason, it is a point that we cannot omit. Teachers can adapt several rules for each specific group, activity or situation involve into the classroom management. The rules should not be elaborate without a previous contact with the group that teacher is going to train, needless to say about the plagiarism, which can be worse if our school has a different context than the school that we plagiarize.

REFERENCES

Burden Paul R. (2000), Powerful classroom management strategies, Corwin Press, Inc.

Johnson Adrienne (2007), Successful urban teacher classroom management techniques, Lulu publishing.

Marzano Robert J. (2003), Classroom management that works, ASCD.

Why should we use project based learning and task based learning in teaching English?

As we know, everything in the world has to evolve like a nature process. As life in the earth planet, the way to acquire the knowledge must to advance according to the present time. Out of the caverns the world began to change through the time, and the knowledge was transmitted generation to generation by people that we called teachers, so the role of the teachers always has been to look for the better way to transmit their knowledge and guide to the learners to devolve their own capacities in order to practice what they have learned.

We are the new generation of teachers in Colombia and for this reason we are engaged with the learners and their learning. Besides, we have to take into account the present context when we are going to teach in a specific situation, all learning process are not useful for every countries, schools or students, besides the context is not the same that 100 years ago.

When I was studying at the college I found different kind of teachers in that place, most of them were teacher which taught in a traditional way. I remember a special teacher that always was sit down at the corner in front of us; he spoke a lot on his chair and dictated what he wanted we learned. Other teacher wrote on the old blackboard all the time, he walked of imposing form around the classroom asking for the homework or the activity developed in class. Everybody hated those teachers and we felt bored and disappointed in their classes. In that time I thought that teachers had the worst job in the world and for that reason they acted in that manner.

I am not going to talk about my school teachers, but I consider that those examples are a good way to tell that this cannot continue. In my experience like teacher, I have learned more than what I have taught, it does not mean that I am a bad teacher, on the contrary I have been the opportunity to practice with my students everything what my professors in the university have been taught me.

Recently, I discovered two new techniques of learning process which are revolutionizing the learning process in the world since some years, those techniques are task based learning and project based learning. Actually, they are not totally new, the teachers who practiced a task based learning in the past thought in the task like a piece of translation which could help them like a literary source.

Before treating these topics, we need to know what a task is. According to Jane Willis in her book Framework for task based learning a task is an activity “where the target language is used by the learner for a communicative purpose (goal) in order to achieve an outcome.” It means that the activities in task based learning have to focus in the communicative approaches in which the students are going to develop their skills taking into account their previous knowledge and the purpose that the teacher want to obtain.

In task based learning we can find three stages: The pre-task, where the teacher introduces and defines the topic and the students plan how developing it. The task cycle, in which the students perform the task in pair or small groups and then they present their work and their conclusion to the whole class in spoken or written form. The final stage is the language focus stage, in this stage the feedback of the students and their partners about the development and the conclusion of the task is the main point Willis (1996) said as a conclusion that The main advantages of TBL are that language is used for a genuine purpose meaning that real communication should take place, and that at the stage where the learners are preparing their report for the whole class, they are forced to consider language form in general rather than concentrating on a single form (as in the PPP model). Whereas the aim of the PPP model is to lead from accuracy to fluency, the aim of TBL is to integrate all four skills and to move from fluency to accuracy plus fluency. The range of tasks available (reading texts, listening texts, problem-solving, role-plays, questionnaires, etc) offers a great deal of flexibility in this model and should lead to more motivating activities for the learners. Learners who are used to a more traditional approach based on a grammatical syllabus may find it difficult to come to terms with the apparent randomness of TBL, but if TBL is integrated with a systematic approach to grammar and lexis, the outcome can be a comprehensive, all round approach that can be adapted to meet the needs of all learners.

Project based learning is an excellent way to improve the interest and the motivation of the students in a specific area; they can do that, because they are going to work and develop their project like they want to do it. It is a didactic method in which the students will learn the concepts of a subject through a project; this project could be a problem which is designed, advised and supported by the teacher and developed by the students. The goal of the project is that the students can acquire a particular knowledge while they are developing their own project.

In accordance with Miguel Valero Garcia, professor of Universidad pública de Navarra, the (PBL) project based learning promote the most important skills in the students, such the work in group, the autonomous learning, the planning of the time, the work by projects, the oral and written expression and the student motivation . This is new for us, because we are accustomed to see to the teachers in front of the learning process, they plan the classes, they give to the students the instruction of the activities, they evaluate to the students process and their results, on the other hands are the students, they used to follow the teacher plan and everything that the teacher said, in this case the objective is the teaching. However, in the project based learning the teacher follows the students’ plan and the objective is the learning.
As a conclusion, I am going to quit in this paper some words by Cairlins Morales “the new techniques in education are not further than the evolution in the teaching of education which is used like a tool to facilitate an actual learning”

REFERENCES

Jane Willis, A framework for task-based learning, Longman ELT

Jeremy Harmer, How to teach English, Longman

Jeremy Harmer, The practice of the English language teaching, 3rd edition pp86-88, Longman


ALEX ARTURO DOMINGUEZ CARVAJAL

How can we integrate the linguistic skills in teaching English?

English language is a basic need to the individual and professional development of the students. An actual English teaching process should mean to some students a great opportunity to obtain a successful job, in which they can acquire everything, what they have dreamed. In other cases, like in the educative cases at schools or universities, it could be like an important tool in the student’s development, in order to deepen in different knowledge areas.

English teaching must be based in eclectic principles; it means that teachers should apply several kinds of methodologies, which teachers have to have learned and practiced across learning process and teaching experiences. Teaching a language cannot be right; teachers should take into account the student’s need, their cultural, social and personal context during the learning process, so in this way the four communicative skills are interconnected.

An effective teaching process must gather the four linguistics skills in a whole didactic unit which have to be integrated all of them instead of work them in a separate way. Of course, in this educational process should exist a progressive development in learning-teaching procedure, owed to the different academic levels of the students, which could vary since basic or elementary level to advanced one. In other words, when people start their English studies they cannot use their productive abilities with a low English level, in a better way, they should begin with a basic level of oral comprehension (listening) and some written activities. This happen in a natural process like in the mother tongue; According to Chomsky’s innatist view led to the notion of the meaning-seeking mind and the concept of a natural approach to language learning. In a natural approach, the learner works from an internal syllabus and requires input data to construct the target language system.

Some years ago, applied linguists began to recognize that listening was the primary channel by which the learners gain access to L2 data, that listening therefore serves as the trigger for acquisition. “Initial methodology research suggested that listening first methodology" such as those proposed by Asher (total physical response), Postovsky, Nord and Winitz (the comprehension approach) would be much more successful than methodology that did not have an explicit or consistent role for listening.

After oral comprehension, students could have the capacity to make an oral production, and at the same time or parallel, reading comprehension and written production (according to their learning levels).

Much research into the global aspects of speech production has traditionally been subsumed under sister discipline of applied linguistics, such a pragmatics, socio linguistics or ethno linguistics. These disciplines share a common interest in the relationship between language and social interaction.

The main goal in teaching the productive skill of speaking will be oral fluency. This can be defined as the ability to express oneself intelligibly, reasonably, accurately and without too much hesitation (otherwise communication may break down because the listeners loses interest or gets impatient). “To attain this goal, we have to bring the students from the stage where they are mainly imitating a model of some kind, or responding to cues, to the point where they can use the language freely to express their own ideas…” it was mention by (Byrne, 1986: 9-10).

The future of the learners is in our hands (teacher’s hands) and in the way in which we develop the teaching process to the English students. This teaching should go since the receptive skill to the productive actions and in the same way, we as teachers have to plan or put in order our lesson plans, what this mean that we cannot mix the linguistic skills without a chronologic plan.

Reading comprehension is remarkably complex, involving many processing skills that are coordinated in very efficient combinations. Because we read for different purposes; reading to search for simple information, skim quickly, learn from texts, integrate information, critique texts, for general comprehension, write or search for information needed for writing (THE NATURAL FOR READING ABILITIES). The reading process needs some previous knowledge in order to decoding and comprehends what we read, for this reason, it requires the teachers guide and an actual chronologic plan. Gough, Hoover and Peterson (1996, p. 3) argue that Skilled reading clearly requires skill in both decoding and comprehension. A child who cannot decode cannot read; a child who cannot comprehend cannot read either. Literacy – reading ability – can be found only in the presence of both decoding and comprehension. Both skills are necessary; neither is sufficient.

The material used by teaching English is very important in the process and it should has some particulars characteristics in order to obtain effective results and goals of students and teachers; First, this material has to be easy to see, read and listen, also it has to motivate students to learn more and more according to the student’s level and their goals. The material should be effective and progressive, which is going since activities controlled by the teacher to open activities in which students could be more creative in order to produce their knowledge freely (communicative approach). In addition, I have to say that we cannot delay the productive activities in Basic English learning process, because the students challenge is learning English in all their dimensions, and we as a students know about the anxiety to be fluency and the need to express what we feel in English.

In order to come to an end, it is important to add that learning – teaching process in a second language, teachers and students have to participate in two specific roles. First, in the elaboration of a syllabus, where teachers had been a previous knowledge of the students English level, and second, the student interaction in a great socio-cultural context.

REFERENCES

Michael Rost (2001). Teaching and researching listening. Lodman person education.
Rebecca Hughes (October 2002). Teaching and researching speaking. Lodman person education.
Ken Hyland (2002). Teaching and researching writing. Lodman person education.
Wiliam Grave and Fredricka L. Stolen (2002). Teaching and researching reading. Lodman person education.

ALEX ARTURO DOMINGUEZ CARVAJAL

Advising and supporting Teachers

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Technology

Technology deals with human as well as other animal species' usage and knowledge of tools and crafts, and how it affects a species' ability to control and adapt to its natural environment. The word technology comes from the Greek technología (τεχνολογία) — téchnē (τέχνη), 'craft' and -logía (-λογία), the study of something, or the branch of knowledge of a discipline.[1] A strict definition is elusive; technology can be material objects of use to humanity, such as machines, but can also encompass broader themes, including systems, methods of organization, and techniques. The term can either be applied generally or to specific areas: examples include "construction technology", "medical technology", or "state-of-the-art technology".
The human species' use of technology began with the conversion of natural resources into simple tools. The prehistorical discovery of the ability to control fire increased the available sources of food and the invention of the wheel helped humans in travelling in and controlling their environment. Recent technological developments, including the printing press, the telephone, and the Internet, have lessened physical barriers to communication and allowed humans to interact freely on a global scale. However, not all technology has been used for peaceful purposes; the development of weapons of ever-increasing destructive power has progressed throughout history, from clubs to nuclear weapons.
Technology has affected society and its surroundings in a number of ways. In many societies, technology has helped develop more advanced economies (including today's global economy) and has allowed the rise of a leisure class. Many technological processes produce unwanted by-products, known as pollution, and deplete natural resources, to the detriment of the Earth and its environment. Various implementations of technology influence the values of a society and new technology often raises new ethical questions. Examples include the rise of the notion of efficiency in terms of human productivity, a term originally applied only to machines, and the challenge of traditional norms.
Philosophical debates have arisen over the present and future use of technology in society, with disagreements over whether technology improves the human condition or worsens it. Neo-Luddism, anarcho-primitivism, and similar movements criticise the pervasiveness of technology in the modern world, opining that it harms the environment and alienates people; proponents of ideologies such as transhumanism and techno-progressivism view continued technological progress as beneficial to society and the human condition. Indeed, until recently, it was believed that the development of technology was restricted only to human beings, but recent scientific studies indicate that other primates and certain dolphin communities have developed simple tools and learned to pass their knowledge to other generations.
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