Tips for teachers on how to perform corrections effectively

As teachers of English as a Foreign language (EFL), it’s part of our job doing as much as possible in order to help our students learn from their mistakes and, at some point, not make them anymore. Unfortunately, no matter how hard we struggle, there are certain mistakes which they make over and over again. So, what can we do to prevent our students from going nuts and frustrated because of it? What can we, teachers, do so that such mistakes vanish from our students "linguistic" life" for good?

Based on my own experience in the classroom and some really good material provided by teachers and scholars on the subject, I'll offer you some tips which, along the way, have proved themselves effective on tackling the mistakes which seem to be made all the time.

Error awareness/detection

  

Starting from calling your students’ attention to the error. They need to notice it within some context in order to be capable of focusing on correcting it. This can easily be done by providing a text or some sentences including the error. 

ask them to physically identify the errors – either by underlining or highlighting them. Asking them to do this physically and not just verbally will make the process clearer.

Understanding the error

Offer the students some instruction. Write one of the incorrect sentences on the board. Ask your students leading questions to create the correct version of the sentence. This can be extended by showing the students a set of sentences, some of which are correct and some of which are incorrect. 

Ask the students to work in pairs or small groups to decide which are the correct ones and how to correct the incorrect ones.

Language Practicing

The next step is for the students to practice the proper language. Create a game or activity which will provide it. Meanwhile, make sure you focus on accuracy. Students must be stopped every time they make the error in question.

The students might find this exercise frustrating at first, but after a while without making the mistake, they will feel motivated and proud of their improvement.

Correcting compositions:
Instead of "giving" your students the right answer, try to point the errors out so that they, themselves, need to identify such errors and correct them. For example: Imagine that the student has written "boll" in place of "ball". Here, we have a clear SPELLING Mistake. Do not simply risk the wrong word, "boll" replacing it by the correct one, "ball". A possibility is highlighting/underlining the error and indicating it with some kind of code. For a spelling one, you can use "Sp", for example. Just do not forget to provide the students with the Key. The ones I use, and which I took from a book, are:
"SP" for Spelling; "T" for Tense; "Gr" for Grammar; "P" for Punctuation; "Prep" for Preposition; "WO" for Word Order; "WW" for Wrong Word; "Y" for "Missing Word" and "NN" for "Not Necessary". 

Reminders

At last, you can put visual reminders around the classroom. Then, whenever your students make the mistake again, you do not need to correct them but you can simply point to the relevant poster and they should be able to correct themselves.

Error correction is a tricky business, especially with those few unpleasant errors that never seem to disappear. The thing is: keep up with your good work by instructing and motivating your students with relevant input so that they can build up some good output, eventually, they will. And the errors will vanish. For good.