Teaching Tip

USE REFORMULATION TO CORRECT

LEARNERS’ SPOKEN ERRORS

Cambridge Dictionary
Jan. 25, 2023

We’re going to give you a tip for correcting your students’ spoken errors without explicitly focusing on them, interrupting the flow of conversation, or disrupting the lesson.
Many students can easily lose confidence and/or their fluency if you ask them to correct the mistakes you notice, and a lesson can quickly become disjointed if you explain every correction you make.
This tip is to use a technique called reformulation when one of your students makes a mistake. Reformulation is where you repeat what the student said but with the mistake corrected or rephrased to be more appropriate. When using this technique, the teacher does not explicitly point out that a student has made a mistake.

For example:

• Student: We are used to go to the beach every summer when I as a kid.
• Teacher: You used to go to the beach every summer? That sounds great!

• Student A: Where is she from?
• Student B: She’s coming from Tanzania.
• Teacher: She comes from Tanzania? That’s interesting.

• Student: I’ve been swimming from I was three years old.
• Teacher: You’ve been swimming since you were three. Wow!

You can make reformulation more effective by telling your students that you’ll be using this technique. If your students know you’ll be using it, they’ll be more likely to notice your corrections and perhaps even start noticing more language outside the classroom.
You can supercharge this technique by telling your students to repeat your reformulation and continue talking when they notice you correct one of their mistakes in this way.

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