"I'm a student at a teacher training college and I've heard about the technique used while correcting writing. It is 'Mistakes Maze'. Could you give me a brief explanation, please? What does it consist of? Thank you."
This question is from Kate, Poland
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Comments
joe
You should involve the writer himself/herself in the correction process. Enabling the writer to edit their own language/mistakes has a long term effect.Peers can also respond to other's writing. Develop strategies to make the trainees less dependent on the trainers!
Jose Kolenchery, Oman
I have tried various methods; using correction code, peer coorrection etc. I have found another method very effective. After collecting the written work,I underline some mistakes in the students' writing. In the next class I prepare a worksheet which has got one sentece from each student's written work; most of the sentences have at least one mistake. There will also be some sentences which are absolutely correct( good examples). In pairs students identify the mistakes / the correct sentence. You can often see smiling faces the moment a student encounters his/her sentece in print. Feedback is given with the help of OHP. Then I hand over their written work and tell them to correct the work, either themselves or in pairs. ( often I just underline some mistakes, not each and every mistake)
Prakasan Kerala , India
Correcting writing becomes a herculian task for the teacher if there are a lot mistakes. So if we do correction in a traditional way by using red ink such as underlining, circling, striking out etc. the note book will be so ugly and the children might lose interest. So it is better to classify the mistakes. For instance spelling, structure, collocation,punctuation so on.Then you can correct each category each week. For that we have to prepare children. You can tell them in advance which area you are focusing in a particular week. I practise this in my class and find it very easy and helpful way of correcting written language
Abdullah Al-Balushi
Coding system of correction is an important techniques in giving students a chance to go over thier own work and try to correct thier own mistakes. However, teachers that are using this technique should expalin the coding symbols that they use when they correct their students' first draft.
Barry Howes, Japan
In a group class I will often make correction of written work an interactive activity. Get the students to mark each others work individually. This helps students to see the common mistakes that are made and understand that to make a mistake can be a good learning curve. Then correct the work as a class and discuss any grey areas, allowing students to explain to each other what they did wrong.
Janet Gosling, Cyprus
Corrections need to be made, but hint at errors and see if students can correct their own work - always find some area to praise eg. good ideas in a composition, even if there are errors in structure/spelling etc students need praise for self esteem and encouragement to keep writing.
Alaa Aldharief, Egypt
To correct the mistakes you should follow some symbols e.g :
AbderRahim CHALFAOUAT, Morocco
Writing is probably a neglected cindrella in classrooms. Teachers deprive their students of fun and real demonstration of what they can do with their language by assigning it as homework. My personal interpretation of 'Mistakes Maze' is that writing is a labyrinth and the fewer mistakes students make the easier and safer for them to get out of the maze. To give marks to the students' writings, I depend on a rubric. Also, in answer to the writing, I write some remarks in the form of questions requiring modification, explanation, correction, exemplification, etc of some information that occurs in the writing. Praise is part of the job.
Kelly Koch
There are some corrections codes that teachers usually use. But I've never used them in my classes, because when I was a student I thought it was very difficult to understand and because of this I used to make more mistakes when correcting, so I prefer to write the mistakes the students make, always in English but in an easy language, it's easier to them correct their errors.
Laura, Uruguay
I usually use a correction code with my students. They are familiar with it and when they get their drafts their mistakes appear underlined and there's a code in the margin so they have to work out what the correct version is.
Mistakes maze as far as I know is an activity to deal with mistakes taken from our students writing tasks, I saw it described in a book called "Correction", I think it is published by LTP but I'm not sure about that!
Jack Daugherty, USA
Have a look at the article Error Correction 1 from the Think section of this site.