When Should--and Shouldn't--You Correct EFL Students?

If you're an EFL teacher, should you correct every mistake your students make? Obviously you can't. But should you try? The answer is: it depends. It depends on whether your goal is fluency or accuracy with your students.

When you're holding a discussion with your EFL students, or asking them what they did over the weekend, or having them describe what they just read in the newspaper, you're aiming for fluency. You want your students to get their ideas across to you and to each other in English as best they can. This requires them to speak without restraint, fear or embarrassment-which is very hard for EFL students to do, especially students below the upper intermediate level. This, therefore, is not the time to correct errors as students speak. Correcting mistakes while students try to communicate will only inhibit them from talking.

What you can do is wait until the students finish speaking, and then talk about mistakes you heard throughout the session and correct them then. The students will learn what they did wrong, but the corrections won't impede their communication.

Then there is the goal of accuracy. This is when you are teaching or reviewing grammar with students. Or when you're trying to help them with their pronunciation. Correcting mistakes is crucial here as you are trying to get students to perfect how they use the language or pronounce it.

Some students will adapt to your correcting or not correcting them naturally. Others will ask you why you don't correct them all the time. At this point, you will need to explain your techniques and reasoning, which will sit well with most students.

However, there is the occasional student who will still protest and ask you to make an exception and correct him (or her) every time he speaks. To fix the situation, this is just what you do. Let the student speak, and then correct every mistake. It will be often. After about five minutes, the student will beg you stop correcting him because he won't be able to get three words out of his mouth without you changing his vocabulary, grammar, pronunciation or intonation.

At this point, almost all students surrender to your authority as an EFL teacher and to your good judgment as to when they should or shouldn't be corrected in class.

Ilene Springer teaches EFL in Malta and is author of An-American-in-Malta.com.