My supervisor said I needed to intervene in correction both earlier and more often, especially with high-frequency or often repeated errors. It’s true. Yet I need to figure out how to do that without it seeming like interrupting all the time, because I believe that raises the affective filter. What I’ve been doing is to wait till the end of everyone’s speech and then go over some of the errors. I could see that wasn’t effective for two reasons: first, feedback was so delayed as to be irrelevant. Second, I didn’t play with each error, digging into it, coming up with lots of examples, and letting them explore the usage: maximizing, as they say. It’s difficult, when there are so many errors, to decide when to correct and when not to. Beyond the human factor — the affect of ill-timed or too frequent correction — I continually have run into the problem of time, especially for my two lower level classes for which I have to adhere to a text. I have to get through this stuff by a certain deadline, and though she points out it takes only thirty seconds to expand, you multiply that times the number of frequently occurring errors and that’s the whole class.

A colleague came to my 4-hour conversation class yesterday, during which I was implementing my supervisor’s advice. Interestingly, her feedback contradicted the supervisor’s advice. She thought I corrected too often: that it was disruptive to the flow and annoying. I was feeling the same way. How do I balance the importance of early intervention without compromising my sense of what is right? There are some specific things about addressing errors that I can learn: splitting the difference between correcting in the moment and correcting ten minutes later: perhaps interrupt an individual infrequently, but address the problems when they’ve finished speaking. And I will have to let some high-frequency errors slide, particularly at this level where everything is a high frequency error: Juan has made statements like “Yesterday I go to store for buy of sugar.” We’ve got problems with tense, prepositions, articles and pronunciation. All are common in the group. All are frequent. I often recast as unobtrusively as possible. But it’s impossible to address even only the highest frequency issues in the moment. Not only that, it’s not sufficient to address them once or ten times.

I have another objective in addition to correct grammar, particularly in my conversation group: to help them feel more comfortable taking risks in speaking. I’ve noticed a marked difference between how they were in the first class — very quiet and shy — to how they are now. Most of them will venture attempts I don’t think they would have before. And I think that’s because I had been doing my corrections gracefully.

I’d like to say a word about my wee ones, ages nine through eleven. They’re sweet kids and I love them, but. I have only five students yet have a hard time managing my classroom. It didn’t take me long to figure out why. First, I didn’t get them enough breaks because I was told not to. I changed that quickly. Second, even though I tried to make my activities as engaging as possible, the kids squirmed and giggled and tossed things. I acknowledge that a significant part of that is my lack of experience in teaching, and my lack of experience in teaching you children. In fact, I’d specifically wanted NOT to teach kids on my internship, but what are you gonna do.

Poor things. Not one of them is at the level of the book they’re using (Backpack 4 by Diane Pinkley and Mario Herrera, Longman, 2005). This means they’ve been through three entire books before this, yet they can barely say “my name is…” Its philosophy, as described in the introduction, seems sound. For example, they write on page vii about their …

“Learner-centered Approach: Backpack ensures that all learners become active participants in every lesson by activating their prior knowledge of topics and concepts and by encouraging them to share and express their personal experiences, ideas and opinions of English. Students engage in activities that allow them to find out more about themselves, each other, and the world beyond.”

However, so far I’ve found the book deficient in having them express their personal experiences, unless you count that exercise they did in which they interviewed family members about how many glasses of water they drank.

I’m excited about the dinosaurs chapter we’re just beginning, but how can kids who can’t say more than a stray noun or two understand about the extinction of dinosaurs due possibly to an asteroid, or Komodo dragons in Indonesia being endangered because they’re losing their habitat and being hunted.

In what I just wrote, all of those are vocabulary words for the unit, along with bamboo, overhunt, islands, die out, in trouble, wild about, Pyrenean ibex, Asian lion, Przewalski’s horse, survive, provide and the like. In three weeks they will be tested on these words and expected to know them.