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.