Tips for Teachers: Correct Correctly

Correction is a must in a language classroom.  However, the difference between helpful correction and harmful correction is significant.  Proper correction will lead to your student's enjoyment and progression.  Whereas harmful correction can lead to their withdrawal and stagnation.

Examples of helpful correction:
1. Speech mistakes: when students make speech utterance mistakes, the most helpful and natural correction type is recasting (the teacher recasts the sentence in natural speech and intonation).  Recasting is what adults do with children regularly as they are learning the correct phrasing of words for different situations.  It gives children the opportunity hear the correct way of saying something several times as they gain confidence in producing it on their own.  Repetition and clarification requests are other options if done carefully but both are at greater risk of causing withdrawal on the part of the student so use them carefully.  Repetition is when the the teacher repeats the mistake and then recasts the sentence, this brings a bit more attention to the mistake.  Clarification requests are very natural in everyday conversation, and so can be used naturally in the classroom as well, as long as they do not draw awkward attention to a student's mistakes.  Examples of clarification requests are questions from the teacher such as, "I'm sorry, I didn't hear that, could you repeat it?"  "Could you repeat that please?"  "What did you say"  etc.  These give students opportunities to hear what they should say in conversation in order to ask for clarification, as well.
2. Comprehension mistakes: When student's actions show that they do not understand a direction or instruction, the teacher should come alongside the student in order to direct them through example, and by using words within their ZPDs, then give them another chance to respond correctly.

Examples of harmful correction: 
1. Speech Mistakes: Explicit correction, metalinguistic clues, and elicitation are all at great risk of being harmful in a language learning situation.  With explicit correction the teacher states that the student's utterance was incorrect and then provides the correct form.  This draws unnecessary attention to the error (especially for beginners).  When using both metalinguistic clues (yes/no questions) and elicitation (open questions), the teacher refrains from providing the correct utterance, but rather states that the student's utterance was incorrect and then asks questions to elicit the correct utterance from the student such as: "Is that how we say it in French?" or "How do we say that in French?"  Most likely students are making the utterance mistake because they don't know the correct way of saying something, or they have not heard the natural speech for that situation enough times.  The time for metalinguistic discussion is after the natural utterance has been produced by the teacher, otherwise you risk leading students through a grammatical guessing game which equals language learning danger.
2. Comprehension mistakes: translating for a student when he/she doesn't understand what you have said.  Translation is absolutely unneccessary for language learning!  See post on avoiding translation.