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Error Correction - Bingo Board #1

Error Correction – Bingo Board #1

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This introduction is a little longer than usual, so if you want to skip to the free worksheets below, feel free! If you want to learn more about this activity and how it evolved, please read on…

  • This is an activity that I devised to help my students recognise, learn, and eventually (hopefully) avoid their most common errors in English classes.
  • The students were all adults working individually or in small groups; they are professional business people working for a large corporation. They need to write and speak English every day to communicate with colleagues from around the world.
  • During each class I made notes of their errors in use of English and pronunciation. I also noted new words. After about a month I was able to compile the first Bingo Board, featuring 20 errors that they were making the most often. It wasn’t a scientific process, but they seemed to have a problem with these points. I gave a copy to each student and we went through each error, with them making notes. I tried to elicit the correction, e.g. not ‘Why you…?’ but ‘Why do you…?’ for example. Where I couldn’t elicit the correction I told them what was wrong. They had their notes and were supposed to learn the board at home in readiness for the next class.
  • We met twice a week and we started with the Bingo Board for about 15-20 mins each lesson (90 mins). It became a routine and something they were expecting. I asked random students to give me the correction of, say, number 10. In this way, we focused on their specific errors at the beginning of each lesson for around a month – until I created the next board (there are more in the series). After a few lessons the students had to correct the errors without looking at their board. In this way they had to regularly focus on and  memorise their most common errors and the typical corrections.
  • They were called bingo boards because the original intention was to cross off errors as I heard them during each class. If I got a vertical or horizontal line I would shout ‘Bingo!’ It did not become that prescriptive in the end, but often when students recognised an error from the board – whether they or a colleague had made the error – they would shout “Bingo!” The aim was to often and systematically present students with their errors so that when they made them ‘in the wild’ – in real spoken or written English – they would recognise them and immediately correct them.
  • Over time students reported informally and unprompted that they had learned many of the errors and were able to use the structures correctly in spoken and written English. Other errors proved more difficult to eradicate and continued to pop up from time to time. We are working on them!
  • While these boards were developed specifically to deal with the spoken errors of Polish students, there is plenty of universality to the errors made – e.g. problems with question forms – and I hope that other students will be able to use and benefit from these boards. There is also a blank bingo board where you can insert your or your students’ errors to personalise it.
  • After three boards with tips I decided to make it harder for them and therefore stopped providing tips. I wanted them to learn the errors – cause and correction – without permanent tips. This also had the advantage of leaving more free space for them to write notes, which they had needed with the previous boards.

Below you can find each error along with a suggested correction in bold (answers may vary in some cases), the original tip, and a little commentary, where necessary. You can also download Bingo Board #1 and a blank bingo board. I hope you find this material helpful. If you do, why not get in touch and let me know. You can also leave a comment or review below, or on Facebook or Twitter.

Error Correction – Bingo Board #1:

Direct download: https://purlandtraining.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/error-correction-bingo-board-1.pdf

Error Correction – Bingo Board (Blank):

Direct download: https://purlandtraining.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/error-correction-bingo-board-blank.pdf

Error Correction – Bingo Board #1

1. why you … ?    wh + aux + subject + verb

Why do you …?

2. I need go …    need + noun / need to + infinitive

I need to go

3. my friend are …    singular / plural confusion

my friend is  or  my friends are

4. all people    sounds like ‘old people’; we have a single word for this

everybody  or  everyone

5. I must to go …    modal verb + infinitive; must / have to

I must go    after modal verb: bare infinitive

6. people  /i/    wrong vowel sound

Pee pl – people has a long  ee  sound on the first (stressed) syllable, not a short  i  sound

7. how to say … ?    wh + aux + subject + verb

how can I say …?  or  how should I say …?  (various answers are possible)

8. if I will go …    1st conditional: present simple + future simple

if I go …    we never use will in the if-clause

9. he told that …    tell + object pronoun

he told me / her that …    we need an object pronoun after tell

10. he want …    present simple: s form for third person

he wants …

11. she said me …    no object pronoun after say

she said …  or  she said x to me    see also #9 above

12. we have much time    much in negative + question forms

we have a lot of / plenty of time

13. I think yes    direct translation from L1

I think so

14. two persons    wrong word – too formal

two people

15. she goes also …    mid-position adverbs go before the main verb (after BE)

she also goes …  or  she goes … as well / too

16. how it look like?    how + aux + subject + look? / what + aux + subj + look like?

how does it look?  or  what does it look like?

17. hospital  /a/    schwa sound (unstressed) in suffix

Ho spi tl – the letter ‘a’ in hospital is pronounced with a schwa sound, not  /a/ 

18. go to home    in this sentence ‘home’ is an adverb, not a place with ‘to’

go home

19. she didn’t saw …    use infinitive in past simple negative

she didn’t see

20. it’s somebody here    there’s + noun = existence / place; it’s + adj = describe sth

there’s somebody here

– – – –

With thanks to the students involved, who consented to the publication of this Bingo Board.

This material is completely free to use, so please feel free to share it widely!

If you have any feedback about these free resources, we’d love to hear from you! Please leave a comment or review below or on Facebook or Twitter.

Teaching Blog: Cartoon Stories - Pair Presentations

Teaching Blog: Cartoon Stories – Pair Presentations

Since last Thursday I’ve been teaching cartoon story lessons with my groups. You may want to try this lesson with your classes, so here’s what we did. If you do try it, please do let me know how it goes down!

Procedure:

I asked the SS (students) to work in pairs and take out their notebooks and pens. I drew a three-panel cartoon strip on the whiteboard (as in the image above). I deliberately chose something simple, with some drama (the “shocked” character in the middle) and some action (the character leaving). The SS were intrigued – to varying degrees! I drew the speech bubbles and asked the SS to think of the story and write the dialogue for the four speech bubbles. I encouraged them to consider:

  • the characters
  • their relationship
  • the situation
  • the expressions of the characters and what emotions they signified

After a few lessons I banned the students from using the topic of romance/love/relationships for their dialogues. Some SS asked “Why?” and I said, “Because it’s too easy.” The comic strip is rather leading in that direction. Many SS from the first groups used relationship tropes – as in “I’m leaving you…!” or “I’m pregnant! And it’s yours…!” – so when the SS had to think of something else they had to work harder, e.g. making the relationship between the characters daughter/father, brother/sister, student/teacher, customer/shop assistant, and so on, rather than romantic partners. This worked much better.

SS worked in pairs or, exceptionally, threes. After about ten minutes each pair came to the front to read out – or act out – their dialogues. (This was the presentation part.) Then I introduced the second exercise of the 45-minute lesson: I drew a series of three blank panels on the board and asked the SS to draw their own comic strip, with dialogue, and with a given topic – in the example above, Crime.

The SS had until the end of the lesson to complete this work. I monitored and checked the pairs (and threes) and collected in the work to mark it. The picture below, by Ola and Ania and reproduced here with their kind permission, was one of the best examples of SS’s work, from a class of 15 year-olds. In this case I had given the SS keywords to include in their comic, rather than a topic.

Extension ideas:

  1. Continue the story with further panels…
  2. Write the next part of the story…
  3. Use the same comic strip, but change the dialogue.
  4. Use the same dialogue, but change the pictures.

Observations

What worked?

  • I used this lesson with almost all of my eighteen groups this week, and it evolved over the course of the week. I had started off using an A4 handout with a much longer comic strip, which the SS had to complete and then present to the class. The strip in my picture above was, to begin with, just the warmer. Over time, I realised that 45 minutes wasn’t enough time to do everything and we were getting bogged down in spelling and grammar with the longer comic strip. My job is to get them talking, after all, not writing in class.
  • The concept of the lesson – writing and drawing comic strips – was engaging for most of the SS, even some of those who had been harder to engage in previous lessons, which was a nice surprise. It was a fun lesson with each group.
  • Neither you the teacher nor the SS need to be able to draw well to pull off this lesson. The goal is to get the SS speaking and doing the presentations. The artwork does not have to be pro standard! (See my example with stick people, above.)
  • It was great to do a lesson without any photocopying – once I’d ditched the original idea for the lesson. The lesson was easy to deliver, with no preparation and minimal resources: just a board and pens or chalk. The resulting work was easy to mark and give feedback on.
  • We were also able to explore topics like using humour in the cartoons and using our imaginations.

Challenges:

  • Some of the pairs tried to pass off very short dialogues, along the lines of “Hi!” “What?” “Don’t leave!” “Bye!” I didn’t accept these and asked them to redo it. A few of the pairs didn’t feel like producing anything.
  • Some students complained about their lack of creativity. One very bright fourteen year-old guy, with a good level of English, said: “But I’m not creative! What would you do?” I replied: “I would try my best.” The problem was that he was not prepared to try. In the end, he refused to do the activity, so he ended up with some extra written homework.
  • There’s a danger that this lesson becomes about writing skills and grammar/vocabulary, with dictionaries out in full force, when what I wanted most of all was to hear the SS speak.
  • There are still significant (I think) issues with the SS using L1 during the preparations stages and not listening to each other’s presentations. I got fed up with saying “OK! Listen, please!” before each presentation.
  • Some of the SS’s work was a bit, well, boring. Their story might be: “Let’s go to the shop.” “OK. I need to buy some bread.” At the shop: they buy the bread. Result: “Let’s have a sandwich!” “OK!” I encouraged them to include drama or humour in their stories by inserting a problem into the situation: “Let’s go to the shop.” “OK. I need to buy some bread.” At the shop: “Hey! The shopkeeper has overcharged us!” Or, at the shop: “Oh no! The shopkeeper is a dolphin!” … and so on.