49 ESL Conversation Games & Activities - Jackie Bolen 2020

8: Give feedback
Top 10 tips for teaching english conversation

Students will of course make errors when speaking. Think back to your own experiences of learning a language, sport skill or musical instrument. Part of learning is just practicing on your own, but I'm sure there were cases when you got some extremely valuable feedback about an error you were making which accelerated your improvement significantly. Our students want us to give them feedback on the errors that they are making and in my own informal surveys that is what students think my most important role should be.

There are two schools of thought about this: error correction can happen during the activity, or at the end. My general rule is that if focusing on accuracy, it is helpful to correct during an activity, especially for the controlled practice activities. If focusing on fluency, correct at the end and don't interrupt.

Don't forget that it's not helpful to correct everything unless with very advanced level students. Doing so will overwhelm your students and destroy their confidence. I will usually correct the following types of errors:

1. Those that impede understanding and communication in a significant way but only if it's something that my students are at a level to understand. For example, maybe a high beginner student doesn't know how to form questions and is asking, “dinner-eat?” It would be helpful to stop and at least write the correct form on the board for the student to copy, “What will ... tonight?”

2. Those that involve the target language of that lesson.

3. Those that involve something students recently studied together in the past month or two.

4. Those that students at their level should have down cold. For example, a high intermediate level student should not be making any mistakes using the simple past.