When Do You Worry About Errors?
Dolores,
I think that the “accuracy question” is the next big item we need to address
in TPRS. People have been asking about it and it is time to start spelling
it out more carefully than we have in the past. We have a “critical mass” of
experienced, accomplished TPRS teacher who totally understand the importance
of CI. We are beginning to understand how slowly we have to go. Now we are
ready to discuss the next issue: accuracy.
The first thing we must acknowledge is that when our enrollment in levels 3
and 4 triples, we have normal students mixed in with the same
“grammar-loving crowd” we always had. These normal students are less
meticulous about grammar and spelling. WE need to hold them accountable, but
we need to do it through meaning, not through grammatical explanations.
I am sure that tons of people will comment, so I will just get the ball
rolling and we shall see what others think!
I teach there are three levels of correction:
1. Caretaker language
2. Which sounds better
3. Try that again
> Level 3 students still did not know the proper was to
> express ownership in the TL.
I did not have this problem in level 1. Here is what I did in level 1. I
used possessions all of the time. Patrick’s nose, Heather’s hair, etc. My
circle of questions during the first few weeks (mostly TPR words like major
verbs, body parts, classroom objects) always included possession. Is this
Terry’s book or Laura’s book. Does the girl eat her own hair or the boy’s
hair. That sort of thing.
As my students began to talk, they started out saying “Patrick’s nez.” I
looked at the kid right in the eyes and said, “Oui. Le nez de Patrick” with
a big smile and the kid kept talking. This is called “caretaker language.”
it is what mothers do when a child says “Me goed.” The mother smiles right
into her beloved child’s eyes and says, “Yes, you went with Daddy, didn’t
you?” In my French class, sometimes the student self-corrected by saying,
“Oh. Le nez de Patrick” and other times the student went right on talking.
It doesn’t matter what the student does. OTHER students noticed the
correction and later when somebody else makes the same error and I give the
same caretaker language, the original speaker will hear it.
Later (perhaps the same day or perhaps the next day) I wrote a structure
similar to “le nez de Patrick” on the board, pointing to it when appropriate
as class progressed.
If a student said “Pat’s nez” after this, I asked, “Which sounds better,
Pat’s nez or le nez de Pat?” I wanted it to sound right’ I didn’t care if
they actually knew a rule about it.
When I could tell that a student actually knew better but made an error of
this type, I just said, “Try that again.”
That is how to do the three levels of correction. It applies to all areas of
accuracy.
As for possessive adjectives, I loved doing the point of view thing because
that gave us ample practice. When we did point of view retells, I wrote the
necessary changes on an overhead. So I wrote subject pronouns, verb forms,
direct and indirect object pronouns, possessive adjectives, disjunctive
pronouns, etc. It was all based on the fact that we are now saying “*I* look
at *my* teacher. *My* teacher gives *me* the 13-foot-long pencil…” So
possessive adjectives were simply a part of telling a story from the point
of view of a character in the story.
Possessive adjectives were worked orally in daily stories by simply
interrupting the story to ask a simple question like, “Does the boy throw
*my* cat or *her* cat?” This techniques is now called “pop-up grammar.”
“Pop-ups” take many forms. Among them are:
1. Ask student to translate what you just said
2. Ask student what a particular form means (Example: what does “mon” mean
in “mon professeur”?)
3. Ask student how to say something that involves the language feature you
wish to highlight (Example: So how do you say “their teacher”?) (Another
example: How would you say “my teachers”?)
You were referring to writing samples and I have taken a long time to get to
your question. I apologize, but I think it is important to front load all of
this grammar teaching in the way I described before actually getting to your
question!
So in a timed writing a student makes possessive errors. Ignore it. A timed
writing shows the student’s level of acquisition, not the level of learning
There was no time for editing so you just know that you need to provide more
CI on this language feature.
But if in an essay a student made possessive errors, subject-verb agreement
errors, object pronoun errors, I would highlight the error. I would
highlight the things that I knew for darned sure those kiddos ought to be
getting right. We had a “person of the month” and whatever was connected to
the person of the month was what I would go after in an essay.
My person of the month generally followed this schedule:
October 3rd singular and plural
November -December 1st singular
January-February 2nd singular
March 1st plural
April-May 2nd plural and all persons.
CAUTION.. I was careful NOT to make a paper too colorful. If the paper were
riddled with errors, I would select the one that was most frequent and
simply highlight every instance of ONLY THAT one error.
If a student didn’t understand why something was highlighted, I gave him/her
a translation to help it sound wrong, not to help with the understanding of
rules. (Example: You wrote “mon mère.” That means “my masculine mother.”)
> Spelling was not the greatest, agreement
> between adj and nouns and subj and verb were problems also.
I think the best way to handle adjective-noun agreement is first to go
through the steps I wrote above in the daily stories. Pop-up the spelling of
the adjectives (especially if there is no difference in the sound.) Write
them on the board. Pop them up some more. Be sure to ask the sort of pop-up
that requires the student to manipulate the language. (Example: What if it
were three big green monkeys?)
Once the subject-verb and general “person” stuff is settling down, highlight
adjective-noun problems. If students do not understand the reason for the
highlight, give a translation that helps them. (Example: You wrote “singes
vert.” I can’t tell if you mean that one monkey is green or if the monkeyS
are green.)
Research says that error correction on papers yields no gains. So my
highlighting of errors may have had no impact. I like to think it did, at
least with the grammar-loving minority. But I may be delusional.
Now that I have killed the evening writing this thing, I guess the short
answer is: Beef up your pop-ups. On the essays, pick ONE THING to look for
and hold their feet to the fire on that ONE THING. Next month pick something
else. I graded essays using a rubric. You can get my rubric at my web page
if you want to try it out.
Susan Gross
Colorado Springs, CO
