Hello all.

Hello all.

My name is Walton. I live in Branford, Connecticut in the US. I started teaching in the Peace Corps in 2001 in the island nation of Vanuatu. I also lived in Kazakhstan for 7 years. I've taught a broad range of students, mostly in private language schools, but I've also done speaking classes and test prep in public schools. Most recently, I worked at an Intensive English Program attached to the University of New Haven. I also write materials for publishers and language schools.

I'm particularly interested in ideas for getting students to talk and error correction. How do you balance letting them express themselves with correcting their errors? And I look forward to hearing about new activity ideas.

Comments

  1. Anne HendlerNovember 2, 2017 at 5:00 PM

    Nice to see you here, Walton. :)

    ReplyDelete
  2. Scott GrayNovember 3, 2017 at 5:14 AM

    Hi Walton, from a previous Penny course she said and my experience supports it is the students want or expect to be corrected. I guess it is just getting it in the right mindset is the tough job. Getting the kids to see that mistakes are more learning just where they need to study more and are expected or even something that can show their effort is the hard part.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Julia BlinovaNovember 4, 2017 at 6:01 AM

    Hi Walton Nice to meet you.
    In my experience dealing with error correction, I have learnt that at times it is just easier to ask students what kind of correction they expect/want from you. Some need immediate feedback, some just hate to be interrupted, some are looking for something else entirely. This way I can address the mistakes without 'killing' motivation to speak.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Elizabeth BekesNovember 4, 2017 at 8:45 AM

    For all I know, Walton, it makes sense to have different activities for fluency and others for accuracy. Often you can have a fluency-focused activity, walk around and maybe spot some of the problems in accuracy. Since mistakes arise in context in these instances, it is easier to pinpoint them and work on them right away saying: I heard one of you saying this... It would sound better this way: ... In English we say .... instead (and bravely point out the rule, if there is one that's easy to grasp). If you do this, the remedial work would need to happen soon after the speaking activity. Of course, you can always make recordings, but you may not want to put any student on the spot...

    ReplyDelete
  5. Walton BurnsNovember 8, 2017 at 4:39 PM

    Anne Hendler You too!

    ReplyDelete
  6. Scott GrayNovember 10, 2017 at 10:17 PM

    Have to agree with Elizabeth you should have a number of activities for different uses. Paul Nations 4 strands is great and a good exercise we did in a teacher training at my place of work. We took a number of exercises and put them into where we thought they go on the four strands and then the teachers brought their choices together and we discussed about why we put them into that

    ReplyDelete
  7. Lisa HorvathNovember 19, 2017 at 4:48 AM

    Hey, Walton! Nice to see you here!

    ReplyDelete
  8. Walton BurnsNovember 19, 2017 at 5:37 PM

    You too Lisa!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

For error correction I tend to use the most frequent type of correction, recast.

For error correction I tend to use the most frequent type of correction, recast. I believe I use it because it's quick and doesn't harm fluency and communication entirely. But like Penny Ur mentioned, this type of correction all the time may be ineffective and may I add fall on deaf ears most of the times. Research shows that the best correction methods are elicitation, metalinguistic feedback and explicit correction so I feel I need to use more of these methods when correcting my students. Also, sometimes I let errors go by uncorrected mostly because I consider them minor or unimportant errors but there are times when students notice them and correct them. Perhaps it's best the teacher corrects all errors and not the students because it could come across as if the teacher wasn't listening or doesn't care and because learners would rather be corrected by the their teacher than their peers as research shows.
Read more

I posted about the Canadian government experiment called Portfolio Based Learning Assessment and noted some of the...

I posted about the Canadian government experiment called Portfolio Based Learning Assessment and noted some of the issues I had with it. Here is a blog post by a teacher who has had more experience with it. Just thinking about teaching and how to teach better... http://blog.teslontario.org/reflections-on-the-implementation-of-pbla/#.WvCDXhcUOVN.google_plusone_share
Read more