How to achieve Self-corection?

Here you'll find some tips to foster self correction on your EFL students

Why is it important?

Self correction is an ability which is important to practice and to develop in order to improve your EFL teaching/learning process, and EFL skills. 

• It trains them to listen to themselves. 

• It helps them take responsibility for their learning. 

• It helps students gain a better awareness of the language. 

• It makes students more autonomous in their learning. 

• It boosts confidence. 

• It allows students to gauge their own problem areas. (you can check the information online at https://busyteacher.org/18127-help-esl-students-achieve-self-correction-6-ways.html)

1. At School

2. Self regulation and self correction became one of the most important process to be develop on the EFL class, but you may ask:
3. "Does it happen on a real context?", the answer is "yes!" based on my teaching practice and also on my learning process it became evident that the students are aware of the grammar structure in addition with the integrated skills: listening, reading, speaking and writing. For example, they try to pronounce a word in a propper way, they try and the teacher guides them to practice and correct the intonation and the pronunciation of each word, and when the student wants to use that word on a sentence, he or she will be aware of the spelling and the pronunciation.
4. The Idea is to help our students to became conscious of themselves in terms of oral production and comprenhension.

5. How can we achieve it?

6. Write It Down

   Write the sentence down on the board. You can go about this in two ways:
   • Write the sentence down as it was said by the student and ask him/her to find the mistake.
   • Write the sentence down and leave a blank where the mistake was made. Ask the student to fill in the blank correctly.

7. The Corrections Card

   Most EFL teachers know that it is not convenient to interrupt and correct students during a performance activity like a presentation or any kind of speech. So how do we get them to self-correct their mistakes? The approach is similar to the above, but for performance activities, we’ll call it The Corrections Card (notice I’m not calling it The Mistakes Card – corrections are positive, mistakes are negative). While the student is giving his/her presentation, jot down the mistakes they make on a little note pad. When they’re done, congratulate them on their presentation and highlight any of the positive points (great use of vocabulary!) then tell the student you’re going to bring out The Corrections Card.

8. Gestures

   The problem with teacher corrections is that we need to interrupt the student. A much more unobtrusive way of bringing their attention to a mistake is to use a signal. For example, when students speak but fail to use the verb in past, I simply wave my hand backward or point to the back with my thumb. Students automatically switch to the past tense. You can develop different signals for different types of mistakes like finger counting for word order.
9. 
   
10. The Red Flag
11. Use a red flag (or any colored flag) to literally flag mistakes. This technique is more useful for drilling or intensive grammar practice, but less so for performance activities. 
12. (you can check the information online at https://busyteacher.org/18127-help-esl-students-achieve-self-correction-6-ways.html)