Anthology Chapters 30, 31, and 32; Ferris article

Starting with Ferris's article on the Myth of Error Correction for ESL students I have to say I fully agree with Ferris in that an ESL student cannot be expected to have 100% accurate and error-free papers. I would be very impressed if any student, native speakers included, could procure a completely error free paper on the first few tries. I find this kind of a standard to be ridiculous as I know even I struggle to produce error free writing. It is human to err and applies to all groups, ESL and not. Thus Ferris brings up valid points in giving students the chance to self-edit and really work with their own writing, with the teachers guidance, to be able to better edit their papers. I think this is an important strategy in helping students recognize their own errors.

At the same time I find that working individually with students, not just in writing but in all classes, can become a very difficult task because of the overcrowding of schools and lack of funding to hire more ESL teachers. Individual work with the students can become impossible in some situations which can be detrimental for the students when they don't receive the feedback they need. I see this as an opportunity to come up with a strategy for just such cases. How can a teacher reach their students if they are teaching large classes of ESL learners? Or how can they reach ESL learners in large classes of native speakers in those school who do not have extensive ESL programs?

I think these are two very important questions to consider with this kind of instruction for writing.

As far as the Anthology chapters were concerned I felt they were very straight forward on how to teach ESL students different skills for academic language and academic learning they will have to partake in for their day to day classes. The chapters brought up important steps on how to work with the students to help them obtain theses skills.

Finally, I need to note here what kind of a project I will be partaking in for the semester. I will be writing a research paper on CLT and how this method needs to be changed in terms of how teachers use it, or when they choose to use it.