The Teachers’ Corner:

Today’s blog is entitled “The Error Ladder:  A Productive Approach to Teaching Grammar”.

You’ll recall that in the first entry of this series we talked about the time you spent evaluating assignments and tests and then realizing that your time was not well used by students who just took a quick look at the final mark and didn’t go much further — and how deflating that could be for you after a long evening of marking.

In an attempt to address this, in part, and to deal with grammatical issues without “going down the grammar hole” I decided as a teacher of English to use my marking as a basis for addressing common errors as I took up the assignments, tests or examinations.  That’s when I came up with a concept I called “The Error Ladder”.  I used the ladder concept as a metaphor for climbing up to a point where assignments might be error free (I wish!) or at least free of standard errors that I was correcting again and again.

Here’s the way it worked.  I made up a form that had three of four blocks on a single page.  Each block contained the headings listed in the example below.   As I marked the papers, I kept a note of the most common errors and selected three I would concentrate on after discussing the content of the tests or assignments.  I know you will not be surprised at the list:  the cat-and-dog-sentence, the comma splice, the sentence fragment, inappropriate verb tense variations.  I know you have seen them all!  Here’s an example of the “The Error Ladder”:

Each time I handed back the graded paper, I did the same — three common errors at a time.  But here was the deal:  I would not take marks off for any grammatical error unless it had been reviewed and added to the ladder.  Therefore, students were not expected to be grammatical wizards overnight but rather to be cognizant of a few errors at a time — and the need to avoid them.

In addition, I had students keep these ladders in their notebooks (or “Correction File” — see next week’s entry) and had them take the ladder out and have it in front of them for each test they were writing.  I encouraged them to use the ladder in the same way when they were doing assignments rather than tests.

Finally, I used mini tests on the errors at intervals to keep up their understanding of the errors we covered in the past in the form of “distributed practice” that Hunter used to talk about in her teaching model.  They, of course, could not use the ladder on these mini tests for obvious reasons but that was the only situation when that was the case.

Did it work?  Yes, it did! 

That didn’t mean that I turned my students into error-free writers, but it did help them feel that, if they could concentrate on a few errors at a time, they had a running chance of avoiding common errors in their responses.  In addition, it gave us, as a group, a “language of correction” that we all understood when we ended up dealing with grammatical issues in the future.

Finally, the “Error Ladder” does not have to be limited to the English classroom.  Any subject requiring written responses in paragraph form could use it.  Perhaps “teaching language across the curriculum” might just be the way to go!

Dr. Dan

If you are looking for more resources on this topic, a short eBook on these techniques (and individualized coaching if you wish) can be purchased from our website.