108 Part II: Putting Your Lesson Together
✓ Go round the class asking each student to say a word that some stu-
dents are pronouncing incorrectly. If one student gets it wrong, ask
another student who did well to say it again, and then ask the student
who got it wrong to have another go.
Watch the faces of the other students when one student is speaking. If
you see a frown or grimace on a classmate’s face when a student makes
an error, this is the ideal person to choose for peer correction. At a con-
venient moment you can ask: Hideki, you were listening carefully. Do you
agree with Noako’s answer?
Make sure that students offer correction in English. Sometimes they think that
their friend understands better if they just translate. At least you can train the
students to say something like: ‘How do you say... in our language please?’
Scheduling Class Feedback
The class feedback session is when teachers usually address errors and give
praise, so it’s really important to schedule time for this in your lesson plan. (I
talk about lesson plans in Chapter 4.) During this part of the lesson you can
highlight areas where students got things wrong and deal with the problems
by briefly re-teaching a pertinent point or by prompting self and peer correc-
tion. Feedback involves the whole class offering suggestions or listening.
A lack of feedback leaves students wondering whether or not they were suc-
cessful or actually overconfident.
You can carry out class feedback at various times:
✓ At the end of an activity: Immediately after the students finish an activ-
ity, you can round things up with a review, praise and correction ses-
sion. Use this as an opportunity to weed out any emerging problems in
using the target language before you begin the next activity.
✓ At the end of the lesson: Students may be making significant errors not
related to the topic of the day that still require attention. Handling this
at the end of the lesson prevents going off on a tangent to the detriment
of your lesson plan.
✓ After written homework: When you’ve completed the delightful task of
marking all your students’ written work, make a note of recurring errors
and have a dedicated feedback session about them. If several students
have the same problems, it may indicate that something got left out
when you taught that point.
✓ At the end of the week: Repetition is a great way to remember things,
so make a note of the errors that came up during the week and have
a Friday review. This should help you to assess whether the students
really got the point.
