Title: Unit 4: Correcting Oral Errors
Course: STEP DEV > Section: Correcting Oral Errors

OBJECTIVES

- Recognize the difference between focusing on accuracy or fluency during oral practice.

- Identify effective corrective feedback for fluency and accuracy during oral practice.

- Apply corrective feedback to tutoring scenarios.

INTRODUCTION

During a tutoring session, a tutee will make countless errors. A tutor’s decision to point out an error or not will depend, for the most part, on whether the focus of the activity is on fluency or accuracy.

When the focus is on fluency, the main goal is on communicating.  Therefore, the tutor should not interrupt the tutee to draw attention to their mistakes, as it could cause them to lose their train of thought and more importantly, discourage them from speaking.

When the focus is on accuracy, the tutor should only point out a tutee’s error that they are capable of correcting by themselves.  The tutor should never explicitly correct their mistakes. If the tutee is unable to correct a mistake that has been pointed out, the tutor should instruct them to look at their grammar resources (their grammar book,  the verb chart, the question chart, or the TIP  button in the Step by Step lessons) to find the answer on their own.  In some cases, and to save time, the tutor could instruct the tutee to use the Useful Expressions sheet to ask for the correction, such as “What is the past tense of ______?”

Requiring the tutee to correct their own mistakes has the following benefits:

- Encourages them to take an active role in their learning, which can help them remember the rules better than if the correction was simply given to them.

- Increases their confidence when they realize that they can correct their own mistakes.

- Enables them to become more independent and responsible for correcting their own mistakes when they are working on their own.

PRE-ACTIVITY

1. How would you correct the tutee’s error in the following exchange if you were focusing on accuracy and wanted your tutee to correct their mistake?

   Tutor:   Where did you go yesterday?

         Tutee:   I go to school.

    2.  How would correct the tutee’s mistake in the same exchange if you were focusing on fluency?

ACTIVITY

Click on the video and watch four short exchanges of a tutor reacting to a tutee’s oral errors. Observe the tutor's different corrective feedback techniques. At the end of the exchange, a pop-up will rate the effectiveness of the tutor’s feedback depending on whether the focus is on accuracy or fluency.

POST-ACTIVITY

Click on the button and take the post-activity quiz.