Error hunt

While doing my CELTA course, I learnt to add PACS (Post-Activity Correction Stage) to every lesson I plan. However, everyone who does it will admit that sometimes it's challenging to notice and write down any mistakes, and sometimes, as in case of this writing assessment I did with my students, there are so many mistakes to analyse that you need far more time than a couple of minutes you'd normally dedicate to the PACS stage.

Personally, I think I sometimes neglect my students' mistakes, don't get me wrong. I use different correction techniques, such as reformulations, instant and post-activity corrections but I feel like there's much more I could do to actually make my students learn from their mistakes.

Therefore, last week I started brainstorming while correcting my students' FCE writings (it was one of those moments when you could do anything else but correcting and marking - we've all been there). And I came up with the idea of an ERROR HUNT game for my students. It was quite easy, but a little bit time consuming, to prepare and what's crucial my "guinea pigs" hugely enjoyed it.

How to prepare an ERROR HUNT game

You'll need:

1. A list of your student's mistakes.
2. Post-its.
3. Pins.
4. Answer sheets for your students.
5. A sheet with error codes you've used while correcting writings. I used this one from British Council - I added P for punctuation mistakes, ESP for Spanglish or Spanish and X for extra words.

How to go about it:

1. Write the errors on post-its, don't forget to write the error code on the post-it (you can write it right above the mistake - I didn't want to make it too easy for my students).
2. Pin/stick the post-its in your classroom, hall, wherever your students will be able to access during the activity.
3. Divide your students into groups of 3-4.
4. Set a time limit.
5. Give each group of students an answer sheet and explain how to use the error code to decode/find mistakes.
6. Students get one point for correcting each mistake.
7. After correcting 5 mistakes students can come and check it with the teacher. If their corrections are OK they can steal the post-its so that other teams can't score the point for that "mistake" (Plus you'll have fewer/no post-its to collect after the lesson).
8. Allow students to error hunt until they've corrected all the mistakes or until the time's over.

Feedback  

Go through the mistakes with all the students. The best way to do it is by preparing a PowerPoint presentation with ready error corrections.

What I would change or improve

It was the first time I prepared this activity so I didn't really know what to expect from my students. As I had hoped, they were absolutely into the activity and they got quite a number of mistakes corrected. However, I wish I had assigned more time or had not prepared as many mistakes. I dedicated 40 minutes to the game and only 5 minutes to the feedback. There was not enough time for my students to correct all the mistakes and go through them all.