Research-based best practice suggests that making pronunciation corrections is at best a waste of time, and at worst discouraging to students. At first glance, this seems true because when I make corrections, sure enough, students keep making the same mistakes. Nevertheless, students say they want corrections. Furthermore, as a second language student, I want corrections, too. Not only that, but with repeated correction, I actually stop making the mistake, as do some of my students. True, it’s a minority of students who change, perhaps those who are most motivated to be understood, or those who are able to form the strange sounds, or those who are ready to think about pronunciation along with which word to use and how to form a sentence. On the other hand, it’s probably true that constant correction can be discouraging, and that correction in front of the class can be embarrassing. But what of those who do change? Should we abandon correction entirely, thereby denying students’ development in pronunciation and spoken grammar? What’s a teacher to do?
I concur that correction should be judicious and perhaps targeted. I also agree that there are times when correction should be eschewed, during a question and answer period, for instance. It has been proposed that repeating a sentence or word correctly after a student has made an error is acceptable, yet I have observed that that does not work. It does not, I believe, grab the students’ attention as does direct correction. This, truly, results in no change, no improvement, because the students must first notice the correction in order to change.
It is also true that commonly repeated problems, such as those with pronouncing “th,” should be taught to the entire class as a mini-lesson. But it is still unlikely that students will change without in-the-moment correction, and repeated correction, at that.
Therefore, my belief is that correction does work when it is judicious, targeted, and repeated many, many times.
If this is the case, when is correction appropriate? Surely during reading aloud, during “popcorn reading,” for instance, corrections are helpful. For my students, as well as for me, that repeated, instantaneous correction does bring about change. On the other hand, the number of corrections cannot be so great that the students lose the sense of what they’re reading.
I also think that during practice dialogs, students should be corrected. That is one of the reasons they’re practicing and I’m listening—to work on pronunciation while not worrying too much about what to say or how to word it, as the dialog is scripted. Then, when we move to conversation on the topic, correction should be relaxed; only those items that interfere with understanding should be corrected because the student is focusing on just getting the words out.
In conclusion, I don’t believe the warning against correction should be taken as gospel. As teachers, we need to test the research in our own classrooms with our own students. Scientific studies are not the final word; there are flaws in any study. New research may indicate something different at any time. Besides, the research itself is not black-and-white. It has been found, for instance, that high frequency, as well as fossilized errors, should be corrected. We teachers need to trust our judgment and do what works for us, despite what studies suggest.
