CLASSROOM MANAGEMENT - Correcting & Categorizing mistakes/errors

When a student makes a mistake, the teacher repeats the mistake with rising intonation so that the student can correct him/herself.

When students correct their language mistakes without the help from the teacher or other students.

The teacher corrects what a student has said by repeating the sentence correctly without drawing the student’s attention to the mistake.

The teacher uses a diagram showing students the relationship between tense and time, and this is often used to correct students when they use tenses incorrectly.

This is given to a student by another student in the class; e.g., students can give each other some ideas on things that are good and things that can be corrected in a piece of written work.

The teacher doesn’t indicate or correct mistakes at the time they are made, especially when the students are taking part in role-plays or other oral fluency activities.

The teacher doesn’t correct the students’ mistakes if they are above their language level or the teacher doesn’t correct mistakes made by a shy and weak student. The teacher doesn’t correct slips, either because they can correct these by themselves.

These are very useful when the teacher doesn’t want to interrupt students but still wants to show them that they have made a slip.

The teacher rewords and says a student’s mistake back to him/her in its improved form.

This is a way of drawing attention to where a student has made a mistake. The teacher counts out the words a student has said on her/his fingers. The fingers represent words and the teacher can show clearly in which word (finger) the mistake was made.