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: