Page 9 - Accents December

Accents
What I have learned about error correction
by Kati Varela
Presented at the AFMLTA Conference in Hobart, July 2019
For over four years I have been exploring the area of feedback giving and receiving in teaching in general. I have made a few interesting and useful discoveries on this area that ultimately led me to engage in an Action Research project with some of my students.
The specific area of research was decided as I noticed, like I am sure many of us do and / or have done in the past, that we keep correcting the same or similar mistakes or types of mistakes in our students. This made me wonder why this might be happening, including how effective the error correction strategies I was using were with the students with whom I was working at the time.
I was very fortunate to be in a school where Action Research was encouraged and supported and I received the assistance of two academics in formulating my research question as well as refining the process for conducting it.
The initial process
A brief description of the initial process involved deciding that I wanted to focus on ‘productive’ skills (i.e. speaking and writing). I was advised to focus on only one of them and it was suggested writing would be more practical in my context as data and samples would be easier to collect and analyse. (That was definitely good advice!)
I was very glad to find out that for Action Research, there was no need to have a ‘control group’, an idea with which I was not very comfortable, but also that it was not necessary to have strict statistics for ‘measuring’ results. Instead, the analysis would be more qualitative.
The other two useful pieces of advice I received in this part of the process were:
(a) to choose a small-sized group if possible as they would be easier to follow and to observe (I had originally thought to do it with two different classes in two different year groups); and
(b) to work with a mixed ability group of students as the techniques could be tested with students with different profiles.
Volume 23 Number 1 Page 9