Helping teachers correct structural and lexical English errors

This paper appeals for corpus-based research with the ultimate objective of helping local ESL teachers deliver pedagogically sound error-correction feedback to their students. One intermediate goal is to establish an error taxonomy, which is best organized by following an approach which incorporates both structural and lexical errors. A fairly comprehensive review of local research on ESL errors suggests that the findings to date are fragmented, offering little useful pedagogical insight to ESL teachers and students. A partial taxonomy of Chinese Interlanguage (Yip, 1995) errors based on the authors’ observations and available data is suggested. Two examples are provided to illustrate how a teacher can use corrective feedback constituted by a set of pedagogically sound procedures to help learners self-monitor their own written English output.