How to Correct Yourself Outside Class
How to Correct Yourself Outside Class
How to Correct Yourself Outside Class
One of the most common complaints from students is that they do not get adequate correction of the mistakes that they make in class. This might be due to their thinking that this is one they could not do on their own. In the end though, in order for you to speak or write good English, you will need to correct your own errors. This article features suggestions on how to develop self-correction skills and to start using more accurate English, without help from a teacher.
Error correction tasks
A great way to learn to correct your own mistakes is to practice on other people. If you Google "correct the mistakes," you will find numerous online exercises, for you to practice on. The error correction task in FCE and CAE Use of English is another useful source of exercises, in which you are to cross out words that are not necessary.
Study partners/ Study groups
You can combine correcting other people's mistakes with having your own corrected. This can be done by getting together with other people in order to correct each others' work. As even native speakers might be having trouble editing their own work, you will find that you would instantly agree with most of the corrections made by your partners. If there are disagreements about which form is correct, there are various ways of researching it:
You can Google the two likely forms and determine which one is more common. For example, if you Google "the same than" or "the same as", the latter would reveal one thousand times as much as many results, and so it is obviously correct. If the result is not so clear or you think that it could be a common error even for native speakers, you can try the same thing with the use of Google Books search. It is very important to always use quotation marks around the search terms in order to ensure that the words are together on the page.
You can Google it as a question. For example, when you search for "Is staff countable or uncountable?" it would bring up lots of people trying to answer this question.
You can ask a question on an ESL forum, for example, http://www.usingenglish.com/forum/
You can leave a query on a website that specializes in answering questions such as Yahoo Answers.
You can look it up in a grammar book, such as by searching for it in the index
You can also ask a teacher, probably before or after class, if it is something that the other students would not be interested in.
Conversation exchanges
If you have a native speaker to assist you, most of the problems with unreliable error corrections would disappear. At this time, it is perfectly possible secondary to conversation exchanges, in which you could teach someone your language and they could teach you theirs. If you could not find someone locally, there are websites that specialize in setting up international conversation such as through Skype and Instant Messenger. Most people would want to have the opportunity to chat in another language through conversation exchanges. You might not become popular if you expect your conversation partner to correct pages of written work or correct every error that you make. If it would be okay with them, you could try picking out three or four parts of your written work that you are unsure of or a part of your spoken grammar that you want them to feedback on.
Test teach test (and test again)
If you are using a self-study book such as English in Use, you could try doing the exercise first, prior to reading grammar explanation. When you have read the explanation, try to find out if there are any answers you would like to modify. You could then check your answers with the key at the back of the book. However, do not mark or alter any of the answers on the page. After a week or two, go back and look at the answers again. Determine whether you can remember which ones were wrong and why.
Your common mistakes
Another thing you could do when doing grammar or vocabulary exercises and checking your own answers, it to jot down the errors you made in a separate notebook. You can look through this once or twice a day and tick off the mistakes that you are sure that you would not make again. After a few week of doing this, you should have a list of spelling errors, grammar mistakes that you often make. You can then use this list after you have done a piece of written work by looking through the work again to make sure you have not made any of the errors that are on the list.
Check for typical mistakes
When you finish a piece of your written work, and gone through it looking for specific errors you often make, you could do the same again for more general typical problems such as articles (a/ the/ an/), adverb word order, and prepositions (at/ on/ in/). These could be checked against a page in a grammar book, with internet search, or dictionary.
Spell-check and Grammar check off
You can try writing your work with the automatic checking of spelling and grammar in your processor program inactive. Check your own work once, and then turn the functions on and see what things they correct. You can then copy down any important ones into your common mistakes notebook. You could also print off the uncorrected version as well as the corrected version, and use that in the next few days or weeks to check your enhanced editing skills.
Leave it till later
Even native speakers have trouble editing their own work, as your brain frequently sees what you are planning to write rather than what you would actually write. A great tip for you is to leave your work for at least two days and come back to it to do the final edit. You will be surprised how many errors you can now find. If you spent days doing any of the things mentioned to improve your skills in editing, you would also be able to pick out mistakes that you did not know about when you first wrote that piece.
You could do the same with speaking by recording your own voice and listening to it after a day or two. Mini-presentations such as IELTS Speaking Part Two are most useful for this where you speak uninterrupted for one or two minutes.
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