How can you make oral error correction more fun… and more effective? Nigel Caplan has the answer.
I’ve always found oral error correction to be much more difficult and less likely to stick than corrective written feedback.
The attention to form in a spoken correction or recast is often fleeting and can be missed, ignored, or forgotten more easily than a red mark or error code. However, the research shows that timely and well-focused oral error correction can be effective, especially if students can demonstrate “uptake”; that is, if they have the opportunity to produce the target-like form. Here is a fun activity I use in my speaking classes to facilitate grammar learning.
The activity is based on an improvisation game called Whose Line? In this game, made popular in the television show Whose Line is it Anyway?, players are given three strips of paper with different sentences. They improvise a scene, and at any time, a player can pull out one of the strips and must read the phrase exactly, trying to incorporate it into the scene. I know some teachers already use a game like this for pronunciation practice, for instance (with a strip that reads “Six thick thistle sticks”):
A: In situations like this, I always remember what my father used to tell me.
B: What’s that?
A: (reads) Six thick thistle sticks.
B: Was your father a prickly man?
A: Yes, and if I had a thistle stick now, we could defend ourselves from that wild bear!
Of course it produces weird sentences, puzzled looks, and lots of laughter, but that’s what improv is all about!
To adapt the game as a grammar activity, I take a selection of errors from recent speaking or writing tasks, and put each one on a slip of paper. We then review the sentences and discuss how to correct them. Then, we play Whose Line? Students again have three strips but this time with incorrect sentences. During the improvisation they can use their strips at any time, but they must correct the sentences as they read them. For example, if a strip contains a sentence with a relative clause error such as “*That’s the woman which I saw yesterday,” the following conversation might take place:
A: What are you looking at?
B: (reads) That’s the woman I saw yesterday.
A: Who is she?
B: I think she’s my long-lost twin sister.
The game can be repeated with different partners and slips of paper. The downloadable suggests a situation: on a train. Other possible good situations are at an airport, in a hospital, waiting in line at a supermarket checkout, in the student lounge after class, and at a teacher’s meeting. You can also increase the number of strips each player has. At the end, you can have students write a dialogue or paragraph using all the corrections, or study the corrections for a quiz.
The downloadable handout contains the directions for students and sample sentence strips with errors at the upper-intermediate level.
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