Error Analysis: Nouns, Articles, Conditionals, Modals

Errors in grammar, usage, and other form-related aspects of English are only a part of your ELLs’ proficiency. When assessing your students’ writing, you will want to develop rubrics that examine the overall meaning of a piece as well as its organization and vocabulary, in addition to its sentence-level grammar. In this error analysis, then, you aren’t responding as you would to a piece of your own students’ writing, but rather you are gaining practice in identifying, explaining, and deciding what action to take with regards to typical ELL error patterns.

For this assessment, you will analyze and explain errors in sample student essays, determine ways to help students add new structures to their language (e.g., modals and conditional sentences) based on your analysis.

Instructions:

• Using the Error Analysis, Part II: Nouns Conditionals, Modals handout, pick one of the two sample essays to edit.
• Using the track changes feature of your word processing program, identify errors in nouns, articles, conditionals, and modals. Then, using the comments feature, explain how you would correct these errors.
  • Example: “This noun needs ‘the’ instead of ‘a’ as an article because the reader already knows what the noun is.”
• Choose two of the identified errors and explain, in Section 2 of the handout, how you might teach correct usage of this pattern.
  • Example: “The conditional errors in this essay are a bit too complex for my second-graders. However, they are learning about cause and effect, so I could introduce “if” sentences with the story If You Give a Mouse a Cookie.

• Save this Assessment as “NounEdits_firstinitiallastname” and submit it to the Gradebook by the end of Week 3.