1977 Articles

The treatment of error in oral work

Fanselow, John

In 1976, I started participating in Brown Bag Lunches hosted by Arno Bellack at Teachers College, Columbia University focused on classroom observation. Arno and his colleagues had recently published The Language of The Classroom . They showed that social studies teachers who had been recorded teaching a speech by John F. Kennedy on trade focused on very different sections of the speech but that the questions they asked were very similar. They focused on fact questions.

The participants in the Brown Bag Lunches asked the Dean to provide money to support junior faculty who wanted to analyze classroom interaction. I applied for a grant and was given money to purchase video tapes so I could record classes.

I submitted my findings to Foreign Language Annals. They were published in 1977, a year after I started my research.“ Foreign Language Annals. Vol. X, No. 5.

Keywords: Classroom observation; Error correction in ESOL classrooms