Unite 5, Exploiting Learners' Errors.
Question 4 , how do you help learners to se that making mistakes can be a positive thing?
Well, for me I comment only on the common mistakes not the rare ones. So most of the time i write the frequent mistake on the board and ask the students to correct the mistake(s). After analyzing the mistake(s) orally, I write the correction on the board so that they can avoid the mistake(s) next time. I think sharing the mistakes makes the learners more accurate about their sentences since they always ask me to correct so.
Question 5, Do you have any other good ideas for exploiting students's mistakes?
From time to time, I ask the students to work in groups to write -on a small white board- two or three sentences containing errors regarding our grammar lesson. Then they exchange the boards to correct the mistakes. What I noticed is that:
1- the learners think that they write a false sentence while it's correct.
2- The other groups say that the sentence is correct while it's also false.
3- Some learners know that there is something wrong with the sentence but they cant figure out the mistake.
4- Some learners copy the false and the correct sentences on their notebooks to study them more at home.
So with this small and simple activity, the learns learn so much form their "mistakes"