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to the teachers out there

PLEASE LEAVE YOUR COMMENTS I WANT TO KNOW WHAT YOU THINK :)

I am doing a literature review on the shift of the traditional structural approach to teaching a language (e.g. Grammar-Translation Method) to the more contemporary functional-contextual approach (communicative method)... I came across THIS while reading an article:

From the grammarian George Curne, cited from Bandwagons Revisited: A Perspective on Movements in Foreign Language Education by Frank M. Grittner (1990) in the book New Perspectives and New Directions in Foreign Language Education (p. 19).

[talking about how errors are handled in the grammar translation method] "bla bla bla bla ... Similarly, the grammarian George Curne (11) saw error correction in terms of students' written productions and connected red ink on student papers with the pleasure that comes with a job well done:

At regular periods under any system the teacher himself ought to correct the exercises of all his students and return them corrected in red ink. Many a good man, frightened at the shortness of life, has said: "I haven't time for this, I must reserve some time for my own development." The answer has always come to the author from the uplifted faces of his students, who look so confidingly at him, young men and women full of latent intellectual strength that is just awaiting a sympathetic touch, a word, to be aroused to a healthy activity for a whole life, which will go on when the teacher's life has stopped. The writer has on his shelf an array of empty red ink bottles that tell a story. As he looks at them he has no word of regret. Now and then a letter from an old student sends a warm glow throughout his whole body. It paid! (p. viii).

Comments

daronloo said…
My ego would plummet and I won't be able to look at that teacher confidingly anymore if he or she returns my corrected assignment covered with red ink.

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