How to Deal with Student Grammar Errors

Fixing language errors is probably one of the key duties of teachers as educators. We are trying to make sure our students learn the right forms and structures and achieve the best possible result. As with all types of language errors, there are a couple of approaches when dealing with grammar one.

On Spot vs Delayed Correction

Some theories suggest that fixing a mistake on spot is very effective as it draws the students’ attention immediately to it, identifies the error and makes sure the same mistake is not made again. There are students who prefer this type of error correction and ask to be interrupted and corrected every time it happens.

Others argue that interrupting the students every time to fix a mistake, results in creating an artificial barrier for them to speak and they start to be afraid of making a mistake every time they want to engage in a conversation.

In my experience, the best approach here is to define the target of the activity before deciding whether to correct a mistake or ignore it at the time being. If the target structure covered during the class is “Past Simple” and the students make a mistake using that structure, I make sure to correct it (by asking the student to repeat the sentence). If, however, the mistake is with “prepositional phrases” for instance, I can decide to come back to it later not to interfere with the fluency and the confidence of the student. Also, when you focus on one thing at a time, you are more likely to achieve a better result than by reacting to every single mistake made during the student’s speech.

As for the learners, who prefer to be corrected all the time, my approach is the following. I do as asked for a couple of classes by following up on how they feel when being corrected all the time. After a couple of classes, they normally agree that not all the mistakes should be corrected at the spot as they can see that communication stops at that point. This is especially true when working with A0-B1 learners.

Now, let’s look at some ways of dealing with grammar errors.

General Correction

To do this, you will need to monitor your students’ mistakes in the exercises, speech, writing task, however you have decided to practice the target grammar structure, and take note on the mistakes. Later, you will need to put those sentences/utterances on the board and ask the students to identify the mistakes in pairs/individually and try to fix them. Here, make sure to include a couple of correct sentences as well, so that the students have a bit of a challenge rather than trying to find a mistake in each sentence.

Individual Correction

If you want the students to take a more personal approach to the individual mistakes they make, you can do this by collecting the mistakes for every student and email them after the class to work on their own ones. This is, of course, a more individual approach and can work very nicely if you are working with a small group of students. However, bear in mind, that this can be a lot of work for the teacher, firstly being very attentive to identify everyone’s mistakes and then checking their corrections as part of the homework.

Exercises

Another creative approach in working with grammar errors is to create exercises with the sentences used by the students which contained a mistake. Let’s say one of your students used the following sentences:

• “I goed for a walk yesterday.”
• “My have born in Armenia.”

After dealing with these mistakes in class, we can take it forward and create a gap-fill exercise for the students to practice the structure more.

• “I have ______(done) my homework.”
• “I _______(go) for a walk yesterday.”
• “My _______(be) born in Armenia.”

This is a more individual way of dealing with the structural mistakes, as the students are working with ones that came out in their classroom and are closer to real-life interactions.

Translations

Though some theories are completely against using translation in foreign language learning, it can be quite useful considering the target you are doing it for. Some grammar tenses/structures have their equivalents in the students’ L1. In Armenian, this is very nicely exercised when dealing with the difference between past simple and continuous forms, between past simple and present perfect, etc. This gives the students a chance to build on their background knowledge and create associations which help them learn faster and retain the information better.

A sample activity that can be used here is to take the sentences that students had a mistake with, translate them into their L1 and ask them to translate it back to the target language. Here students have a chance to look back at the material covered and use that background knowledge to better assimilate the material.

Share with us your experience and tested activities that work well when dealing with grammar errors.