Correcting mistakes.
It is important to say I was born and bred in Russia, former USSR, where it was forbidden to teach speaking whatsoever. Since the political situation was complicated to say the least, the country was behind the Iron Curtain thus nobody was allowed to leave it unless there was a good reason for that. So no speaking let alone listening. What we had was a boring textbook, reading, translating and a lot of writing. I acquired all my speaking skills when I started teaching with the Oxford and Cambridge materials, which were authentic and interesting. What I did was do all the students' work myself before I stood up in front of my (adult) audience. Like Roi (as he mentioned in his post), I was scared stiff of making mistakes, but I was not a pupil, I was a teacher. Who was there to correct me?
Unlike USSR, Israel, correct me if I'm wrong, is a country where there is a lot of exposure to the English language, we have all sorts of population from all the corners of the world, including native English speakers; English speaking culture is all over the place. And I can see it from my students' results. Last night I corrected the mock Meitsav my 5th-graders had done a week back and I was happy to realise that their listening skills (we don't have speaking in the Meitsav, only listening) is way better than their reading skills although truth is I haven't taught them listening skills specifically. I think it's the exposure they have whether they like it or not. Listening is part of speaking - how can you speak without understanding what others say? I teach other grades as well (3 to 9 to be exact) and I see that for many students speaking and listening are not their weakest points.
Therefore, my approach is this:
Encourage students to speak by giving them interesting tasks / games / pictures.
Differentiate: there are students who are naturally shy and insecure and should not be corrected at all, what we need to do as teachers is have them express their opinion, say at least a few words or a sentence.
Then there are other students who speak a lot, they are fluent - these are the ones who do need to be corrected. Their speaking skills are good, they have the confidence. What they lack is accuracy so there's no problem if we correct them.
One of the teachers that I work with is from Russia. We usually argue about how to educate our pupils... He tends to be tougher than me... I tease him about that ;-)
ReplyDeleteOh please don't
DeleteThe question of when and how to correct pupils is a tricky one. As you say, Kirill, it depends on the pupil and we need to make sure we know our pupils well enough to know when to correct and when just to encourage.
ReplyDeleteI think the listening comprehension skill is always stronger than speaking skill, even in the weakest class since it is a passive skill like reading comprehension. The hardest skills to acquire or to teach are writing and speaking since they require producing language. I find that there is a connection between the two skills.
ReplyDeletea)As one of the dinosaurs brought up and taught in the former USSR, I can testify that teaching speaking was never prohibited at that time. The teaching approach was different, the opportunity to speak was not so wide and yes, the textbooks were boring to death. At the same time there was a certain number of great creative teachers who somehow taught us the four language skills. b) Concerning differentiation approach to correcting spoken language, I totally agree with you.
ReplyDelete