To be or not to be- a reflection on error corrections- by Ruby

As an EFL teacher from Taiwan, it is very difficult for me not to correct students' errors, no matter in pronunciation, grammar or writing. Although I know there will always be struggle between accuracy and fluency, I still find it hard to decide when to correct students' errors and when not to do that.

After I read Dr. Park's evaluation on my first teaching demo recording, for the first time, I take that issue into my serious consideration. I always want to be a responsible English teacher, so I feel responsible to correct students' errors whenever I find any. My philosophy is: if professional English teachers do not correct students' errors, how would they know they did something wrong and how could they make any progress if they do not know where to improve? However, after I study TESOL for so many years, I realize that too many corrections might interfere students' learning motivation because they would be discouraged very much about their errors, especially when there are so many!

Dr. Park gave me some advice about if the errors do not cause the communication to break down, we do not need to correct them one by one. That is exactly my blind point. I admit I am very enthusiastic to correct students' errors as soon as I find any and I will never get tired of doing that when I taught English. However, it is time for me to change my teaching philosophy about error corrections. Sometimes it is good to correct students' errors, but sometimes it is also good to ignore some of their errors. It is a great challenge for language teacher to judge the timing and necessity of correcting errors. I guess it is a kind of wisdom and philosophy for language teachers.

Therefore, I make up my mind to tolerate some of students' errors if those errors do not interfere the communication or comprehension. Next time, I will take a deep breath and count from 1 to 5 to relax myself whenever I find any error. I will pause a little bit to give myself a minute to judge whether to interrupt the fluency to correct the errors or not. Yes, that is what I am going to do about it.