Tomorrow Morning

I want to start with a quote straight from our L&S text: "Knowing more about second language acquisition research will not tell you what to do in your classroom tomorrow morning." (194). This was probably the biggest problem I had when it came to engaging with this text because I was constantly trying to put the knowledge I was gaining into an immediate classroom context. I was hoping that I could use something from these chapters with my ESL tutee, but things as simple as error correction are hard to implement right after reading. I don't think that this difficulty stems from my inexperience as a teacher (although I've only met with my tutee once and inexperience is a factor), but like the text says, these are subjects that require some thought and experimentation.

In chapter seven one of the subjects that was touched on which I thought was interesting was number 14 on page 191 (When learners are allowed to interact freely, they copy each other's mistakes). This was interesting to me for two reasons: 1. I have done group work in my second language (German) and I didn't find it very helpful & 2. I wasn't sure if this statement was correct or not. I of course found out that according to L&S the learners do not copy each other's mistakes (which makes sense because I never adopted my partner's mistakes in my German class when I was aware of them), but I also found out that learners at similar levels of proficiency are usually unable to correct a partner's error (which also makes sense since I rarely ever told my partner his/her mistake if they made one. I didn't for a couple reasons: 1. I wasn't the teacher & 2. (like L&S say) I couldn't truly tell them WHY they were wrong. I could easily have told them that they were wrong, but I would've been unable to explain it in a clear way). So does this mean that tomorrow if I have more than one tutee (or in the near future, a class of students) I will absolutely avoid group work? Probably not, but because of my own experience in my L2 (along with the research from the text we read) I will be able to know what to expect from my students when they are engaging in group work... Keeping them on task will definitely be important.