U11 Responding to Student Errors

In this blog entry you will read about three ESL students attempting to write a passage about a good speech. Below the passage is information about the mistakes they made and how I would work with them to become a better writer.

Student A:

to give a good speach and prsuasive the pepole you should talk with trust and blieve what are you talking about. second your voice should be loud and clear so people can listen to you give them a minute to think.now what you should avoid never play with your hair and dont be shy or nervuse, do not look to the floor and speak so fast try to keep your eyes on the audience

Looking at the paragraph of student A, it looks like the major errors are due to grammar and spelling mistakes. Just by switching the sentence over to a word document you see that the student made several spelling mistakes and there are grammatical mistakes like using a double negative like avoid and never. It seems as though the student is on the right path to becoming proficient, but still needs a lot of refining with their English skills. However, when reading this passage I can still interpret the thought and I believe that the meaning they are conveying is not lost with the errors. If I was teaching this ESL student, I would focus on the sentence structure and allow the student to practice forming sentences in common word order form. I would not be so worried about their spelling mistakes because as you see, they are making a great attempt to spell the words phonetically. I am happy that they are beginning to understand the sounds they hear in the words, so I would probably comment on how their spelling is improving. In order to help this student in the future, I would ask them to formulate their sentences in their head, and then give me some detail about what they want to write about. Then, we can work on using the correct grammar together in order to form better sentences. I’m not sure how long this student has been learning English, but it seems like they’re on the way to success. I would like to see a better effort with the writing though. This could be an indication that this student is only comprehending basic information about the components of a good speech. It would be nice to sit down with them and get an understanding for what they were trying to write about.

Student B

always people attention for good speech, but there many thing beside speech make support opinions and points. First, the dital with respond and date it's strong prove in the debate. second, sometime the new information support points better then old information. Third, if the information from some books, the name of book and author most impotent digital in the debate in conclusion the respond, date, new information and name of books and author are support opinions and points in the debate.

when speakers speech, there are things avoid his/her speech. The lewder voice make people attention when the speaker speech. the speakers must speak slowly to be his words clear. The speaker should not be nervous when he/she speech. moreover, chose good words in speech is very impotent thing to makes speech strong, also to steal attention. in finally, always speech avoid speakers.

Student B is having a tough time with using the correct words in his sentence and their grammar makes it difficult to understand what they are talking about. I believe that their inability to correctly use the words and the order in which they use the words makes it hard to understand the message their trying to convey. This would be a situation where I would want to work with the student one on one and just talk about some of their word choice and really try to understand what they are saying. Then I could use this information to show the student the correct way to improve their sentence structure and also teach them about the differences in the words that they’re using. I really feel for these students because words like important look so close to the word impotent, and I don’t want their effort to be looked down on or even laughed at because of tiny mistakes they made. The student should be more aware of those vocabulary mistakes, but I applaud the effort that he is putting into his work. There are a lot of strong points that they are making, but if we clear up the message, then their message will be meaningful to our class and it is important information that will be beneficial to their comprehension of the material.

Student C

Good Speech

Good speech and presintation is an important tool for the speaker to comunicate with audiance and convensing them about a specific point. Humans use 60% of comunication through body language, so it is not only about the verbal language.

To deliver a highly persuasive speech, the speaker must do stratiges and suggestions in order to attract the audiance. By increasing the pitch of the speaker's voice at the important points, people will pay more attention. An important thing to do while speaking is making eye contact to the people, not only focusing on one persone but instead scanning them all. Standing stright and appeare confident of yourself is the most important element of giving a good speech. Good speakers allways prepare the speech or the presintation befor they presinte it, preparing ahead helps you to practice.

There are many thing that the speaker should not do while giving a speech. Reading from a paper that includes all the speech should be avoided. speechs and presintations allways have truble makers, the speaker should not make any trube with them instead he should stop the speech and look to the truble maker eye without saying any word for few seconds. Never point by the finger to something on the board of the screan of the presintation, using a liser pin or any other toole to point is good idea.

The differance between somebody attractive and convincing when giving speech and somebody not is how did he gave the speech. Using all the means to comunicate with people and showing them respict are what make a good speaker. These techniqs and stratiges are learned so any body can learn how to be a good speaker

Student C clearly made a great attempt to write about a good speech. The first problem that I see with this passage is the spelling, but the words that they have chosen can be understood and with a computer program this student could fix that problem in a matter of minutes. It does look like the student may have some difficulties with the short vowel sound. In one of the sentences above, the student used liser instead of lazer. That worries me because he may be attempting to spell words using both their native language and English. I think that this student would have to study the letters and the sounds and really get a good understanding of what each letter sounds like. I think that the problems that I’m noticing do not affect the meaning of his passage, and like the other two students, I would commend this effort. I think his word order is good and he gave us the steps of good speech in a logical order. We could always take the time to go back through his writing and find areas where he should placed the words in a different part of the passage. I really like this effort, and I think that this student has been working hard on his English proficiency.