A classroom A-Z of students’ mistakes and errors
Index cards are great in the EFL/ESL classroom for making an ongoing collection of spelling and grammar mistakes/errors.
When students make a mistake/error that the class finds amusing (or the teacher feels is important to collect), a student or group of students records it on an index card. They write both the correct and unusual/incorrect English and add some visuals (their own drawings or pictures they found on the Internet) to make the differences more pertinent.
The example in the picture above is such an example. My students in the UAE commonly use ‘set’ instead of ‘sit’. I do my utmost best to mime a jelly man setting in the fridge, which students find this amusing, most of the time.
By the end of the semester, the class can build quite a collection. This serves as a valuable record of language that students have produced and worked on throughout their time together.
With monolingual classes, the cards made in one semester will be a good resource for following semesters (students are likely to make similar mistakes and errors). With multilingual classes, small flags could be drawn on the cards so students can look at mistakes/errors typical of other speakers.
Uses of the cards
- Making them is a fun classroom activity to address writing and speaking correction.
- They are great for getting students to notice language they need to work on.
- They can act as welcome relief for those very rare (virtually non-existent) times when you bore your students. Here, you have to hope someone says something suitably incorrect.
- They provide a good source from which to recycle language and make review materials and tests.
- Small groups of students can sit by the cards if they finish their work earlier than others.
- The teacher can use them for a light end-of-class activity, which also serves as a fun review.
- They can be shared with other classes.
- They can be put on the classroom wall as a “Remember this this week” mini poster.
- Students can use a small collection of them to make “correct language” presentations to each other.
- Students can vote on the best / funniest / most creative artwork on the week’s / month’s new cards.
- The cards can be used to explore grammatical and lexical patterns as extended language awareness practise.
- They can be used with any discipline – not just ESL (chemistry formulae, historical dates, maths equations‚ etc).
- The corrections can serve as a contrastive analysis focus to find out why the mistakes/errors are made – especially good when students are translating directly from their own language.
- The teacher can select some of the mistakes/errors he/she feels will come up in a language activity and pre-teach the correct forms.
- Hopefully, at the end of the semester, it lets students see progress they have made.
Other index card pics
My students frequently spell ‘two’ as ‘tow’. Here is their correction card:
An activity from Cutting Edge Pre-Intermediate focuses on short answers. Here are the correct and incorrect answers to one of the questions in the book:
Tags: Error Correction, errors, index cards, mistakes
Hi Sean,
What an inspirational post!
I love the way you give the students a chance to be autonomous, raise their awareness and bring mistakes into the FUN category rather than embarassing and shameful corner.
Sensitive and lazy students alike will really benefit from this, not to mention the teacher too (variety, pace, dynamics). Other great things? Classroom dynamics, ‘humanising’ learners into understanding they do make mistakes and it’s alright, but they also learn they compromise communication unless they learn to listen to themselves and each other better. The list goes on!
Pre-service and initial teacher training often focuses too little on error correction techniques and during teaching practice, an explicit correction slot gets shoved to the end of a lesson almost at the end of the course. That’s usually a question of time constraints and syllabus requirements. So a developing teacher will need techniques and ideas for error correction as soon as he or she starts teaching.
Your lovely index cards idea will appeal to different types of learners – visual and kinaesthetic alike – will enhance classroom dynamics and make the students learn to laugh about making mistakes. Most are embarassed, while this way more time can be spent on recurring or fossilized errors… to unfossilize them?
One example from Italian students is “I go to school with my car” “I play with my computer”. No end of drawings solves this problem. But I’m going to get my next class (PET exam preparation) to make some index cards just like yours!
Thanks so much for this inspirational post Sean!
These are great, Sean! I love the way this brings humor into correction. I can imagine my students having fun with these index cards. Definitely worth a try.
Thank you Chris for such lovely, constructive feedback – a better read than my post
I think it’s important to inject fun into all lessons. Mistakes are such prime targets. It’s easy to wander around various groups of students and note things that need to be worked on. Waiting until the end of an activity and then introducing a correction stage does add a nice and fun change of pace to a lesson. Students who made the mistake generally remain anonymous because no one really knows who it was. Of course, some students like the attention and admit it was their mistake, and that adds to the fun. Introducing a correction stage in the first ten minutes means you have a lot of chances throughout the lesson to recycle the correction, which I find sticks in the students’ minds. Often, by the end of a lesson, the students are able to recount the initial mistakes and the corrections, and laugh third time round.
Good luck with your cards.
Thank you Barbara for your comment.
I hope you come back and provide a little feedback if you try using index cards.
Best wishes
Interesting idea, and I like the way it involves students in the correction & feedback. I wonder how a variation could be used with adult learners?
This looks like an engaging activity that has real payoffs for the students. I look forward to using this with my students. Thank you.