Towards an Individualised Approach to Learners’ Errors

Abstract

When I started working as a school teacher (which was before I began my Ph.D. studies), I decided to try to come up with a clever way of marking my students’ written assignments, correcting the errors of weaker students and only underlining those made by better ones. I found quite soon that it was often hard for me to assess my students’ abilities properly, which I realised when I started getting complaints from them that they did not understand what their mistakes had been. Unfortunately, my enthusiasm decreased, and I began abandoning my practice of approaching errors made by students of different abilities differently.