Teachers helping learners to make what they write or say better or right.
Echo correction – When learners make a mistake, the teacher repeats the mistake with rising intonation encouraging learners to correct themselves, e.g.
Learner: He don’t like it.
Teacher: Don’t?
Learner: He doesn’t like it.
Finger correction – A way of drawing attention to where a learner has made a mistake. The teacher counts out the words a learner has said on her fingers. The fingers represent words and the teacher can show clearly in which word (finger) the mistake was made. A teacher may use finger correction to show that a mistake has been made with word or sentence stress, word order, grammar, pronunciation of sounds etc.
Peer correction – When learners correct each other’s mistakes, perhaps with some help from the teacher. Self-correction – When learners correct language mistakes they have made, perhaps with some help from the teacher.
Correction code. A series of symbols a teacher may use to mark learners’ writing so that they can correct mistakes by themselves, e.g. P = punctuation mistake, T = tense mistake.
Sometimes, a teacher may choose to ignore an error made by a learner in a speaking activity because he/she wants to help the learner with fluency, not accuracy.