Correcting Errors without Undermining Students' Individuality in the Classroom

Classroom education is an institutional interaction meant to transmit the knowledge considered “right” by our society to children. However, recently in Japanese schools, emphasis has been placed on respecting students’ “individuality.” How are educational interactions organized to accomplish these seemingly incompatible tasks? We intend to answer this question in the paper.

We analyze video data of a lesson on national language in a Japanese first-grade elementary school classroom from the viewpoint of ethnomethodology and conversation analysis. We focus on the organization of “correction” and “repair” in conversation. Correction is applied to errors of utterance, and repair, to inaudibility or incomprehensibility of utterance. According to Douglas Macbeth, correction and repair often cooperate in classroom interaction.

Based on the above, we can rephrase our initial question as follows. As teachers must teach “right” knowledge, they must correct students’ “wrong” knowledge. However, this correction threatens to undermine students’ individuality. How can teachers organize the process of correction so as to avoid this undermining as much as possible?

The results of our analysis are summarized as follows. In the analyzed video data, a student read out his imaginary story. There were two errors in the story. His teacher corrected these errors without undermining the student’s individuality: on the one hand, by conducting “repair” with use of a preference for affirmative answer (=implicit correction) instead of explicit correction and, on the other hand, by configuring a cooperation of correction and repair in the order of “repair-applause-correction.”