Most Effective Error Correction Games - UsingEnglish.com (2023)

I want to start this article on error correction games by saying that I'm generally not a fan of error correction being fun. If your students are bored with error correction, it's probably a sign that they're getting too many error corrections and/or don't realize the importance of what they're being corrected on. This is likely to become a bigger problem when the teacher comes up with a good game that lets the students sit through a few more hours of (possibly pointless) error correction. In all but the least motivated grades, students should not enjoy finding out that something they have been saying for years is incorrect, that something could be misunderstood, that something is not directly translatable in L1 English, that an apparently English one word was invented somewhere else, or that no one is actually saying anything their middle school English teacher taught them.

The problem is that even a correction that makes students say, "Really? I never knew that. That is interesting. I really have to try to avoid that in the future," probably won't be enough to stop her from making the same mistake again. The focus in the following games is therefore on making the language more memorable. This can be achieved by having students think carefully about the language before correcting it and by repeatedly exposing them to common mistakes. These factors can be further increased by having students create example sentences or entire texts and then adding mistakes to test with other groups, or simply by including several similar mistakes in one activity.

The following activities are listed in roughly the same order of how often I use them. Many of my favorites add more hearing and speaking, a weakness of traditional error correction. They're all pretty fun, too, by the way - so make sure you and your students don't get carried away and go bug-fixing crazy!

error correction race

Students try to find mistakes as quickly as possible. I find this works best with errors scattered throughout text, but students may need some cues such as being told how many errors to find or that there is one error per line. My favorite version of this starts with distributing an email with just one mistake in it so students can quickly find the (single) mistake. Any group that guesses wrong cannot guess again until the next round. In the next round I give them another email, this time with two errors in it. This continues with more and more emails with one additional error each, usually up to email number seven with its seven errors. In this activity, to make sure they don't just correct and forget, I usually give each email examples of the same types of errors you've seen in the previous emails plus one more new type of error. For example, I could write a formality issue in the first email; then a formality problem and missing closing greeting in the second email; then a formality problem, missing closing greeting and incorrect closing line in the third email; etc.

Error correction pair work

Pairs of students are given Student A and Student B worksheets with the same sentences, but each with an error in one of the two versions, e.g. “I've been here three times” on Student A's worksheet and “I've been here three times” on Student B's worksheet. B. a conversation are given. Perhaps, after collaborating with someone on the same worksheet to find out where the mistakes are, the students will be divided into Student A and Student B pairs. Without showing each other their worksheets, pairs of students try to figure out which bits are different in their two versions, and then decide together whether student A's or student B's version is correct each time. The person who has the version with an error then corrects it to match their partner's worksheet.

When students think they're done, it's good if you can give them a hint to help them and get them to check again. For example, you could tell students that there should be an equal number of mistakes on each sheet and get them to look again if they “corrected” more sentences on one worksheet than on the other. After they have checked their answers as a class or with an answer key, you can give them another worksheet with exactly the wrong sentences to correct, this time you can see all the sentences but without help.

Error correction mastermind

The students try to correct a text or a collection of sentences and can check at any time whether they have corrected everything or not. The teacher just says how many errors are now in the text (including any errors he added because he changed something right into something wrong), and the students try again (and again) until there are no more errors . This activity can be done as a race.

Error correction simplest answers games

In this simple and lively game, students have to indicate as quickly as possible whether they think something is a mistake or not. The easiest version to explain is to give each student a card that says "True" and one that says "Wrong" to run to keep. However, given the numerous possible errors that exist in the English language, it is very difficult to judge correctness based on just one sentence. Instead, I usually put sentences in pairs and ask students to hold up their "A" or "B" card depending on which sentence they hear they think is correct. These pairs can be the same sentence with an error in one version (“A: We still need to do some research” and “B: We still need to do some research”), two different sentences with the same grammar (“A: There are some problems” and "B: There is some information") or two completely incoherent sentences. You can also trick them with two sets that are both right (in which case they should raise both cards) or both wrong (in which case they should keep both cards down).

Other variations include (running and) hitting the cards (good for young learners) and holding up "Informal" or "Error" cards in response to phrases like "Was busy?" and "How are you?" For monolingual classes, you could also have cards with "Janglish/ Konglish/ Spanglish/ Franglais/ Chinglish" on one side and "English" on the other, or maybe "Different" on one card (for words that have different meanings in L1 and English ) and "Not English" on the other side.

Error list dictation

Students listen to a list of similar things until they can figure out why they are wrong and/or how they should be corrected. For example, if you hear, “I wouldn't trust him. He was in a prison until recently" and "I hated French at school", you can award a point for the first person to notice that the article is not needed in both sentences. You could also give anyone another point that can explain why (in this case that both phrases have a special meaning, specifically "He was a prisoner" and "When I was a student", and therefore not really about the place speak ). This activity takes a lot of preparation but seems to work well - at least until the students find out it's not really a game! To add more of a game element, you could give out copies of the worksheet and ask them to select the most difficult category and examples to test their partner with.

error correction reactions race

Students listen and try to react as quickly as possible when they hear something wrong, e.g. raise their hand as soon as they feel they've heard a grammatical error. If someone does something like this when nothing is wrong, they lose a point or cannot participate until the next round. I usually do this with the students listening carefully, but you can also do it as dictation. This can be done with a single piece of text like an anecdote, or it can be a list of similar phrases or sentences (“some cheese,” “some hats,” “some clothes,” “some fabric,” “some t-shirt”), or with different versions of the same sentence (“There is a lot of news”, “There are many newspapers”, “There are a few newspapers”, “There are a few newspapers”).

You can also get students to react quickly when they hear a misspelling. Spell out a list of words, phrases, or sentences letter by letter, and get them to quickly raise their hands if they think you said something wrong. Before you start spelling, you might want to say everything they're going to hear, but it might be more fun if you don't so they have to figure out what's being written too. The game can be played with students writing down everything they hear or just listening carefully.

Grammar Auctions and Variations

In this well-known TEFL error correction game, students try to outbid each other for grammatically correct sentences and avoid sentences with mistakes, with the person who got the best sentences for their money being the winner. This is a nice fun activity, but incredibly time-consuming, doesn't require a lot of speaking from students, and in my experience doesn't make the corrections particularly memorable (and badly named, too, because it's not necessarily about grammar). As a result, I literally never play the original version of this game these days.

To make the language more memorable, it's best to get students to form right and wrong sentences to get other teams to bid on them (with the teacher double-checking if they're right or wrong, like the team intended before using them).

To speed up the game, instead of asking for bids and taking the highest, you could simply give the set to whoever says they want it first and then reveal if they were right. Alternatively, you could have all teams bid as much as they want, and each team that gets it right double their money, making it more like a bet than an offer. You might also give them a chance to double their money again if they can actually correct the sentence.