(This posting includes a handout which you are welcome to use with your students.)*
Because this technique gives students a chance to discover their own grammar errors, we’ve found that it greatly improves their self-editing skills. Those skills will continue to be valuable as students move beyond their ESL courses.
The difference may seem small, but it changes the student’s role. Instead of simply correcting errors the teacher has identified, the student has to find the error and figure out how to correct it. That’s what makes the technique so useful for developing self-editing skills.
Below is a description of the technique, along with a handout exercise that introduces students to it.
(This article was originally published in MET (Modern English Teaching) in the March/April 2026 issue.) MET website
I realize now that I probably had been making a mistake over the past decade of teaching, according to research.
In my Advanced ESL Writing course, every term, I usually had one or two outstanding writers. I wanted to compliment those students at the end of the course with the hope that it could motivate them and give them a positive attitude going forward. On those students’ final essays, I often wrote. “You are a talented writer.” That was not a good idea. I recently learned why, and also, what kinds of compliments would be better.
Research has shown that complimenting students “appropriately” can motivate them and can strengthen our relationship with them. However, certain types of compliments can unintentionally cause pressure on them.
In one study, after 117 undergraduates took a verbal reasoning test, they received one of three types of written feedback:
Dealing with students who plagiarize now seems like a piece of cake compared to ones who now use AI to write their papers. I could usually deter students from plagiarizing by demonstrating how easy it is for teachers to find it.
Early in a term, I would show this paragraph that may have been written by a student:
I’d ask them if they thought the writer had copied any of the sentences from a source. Unsurprisingly, they always spotted the last one. It was a clear signal: if a student can identify it, a teacher definitely can.
However, the rise of AI has shattered that approach.
Why the old technique doesn’t work anymore
Now, I can no long claim that it’s easy to find plagiarism using the sentence, “Aside from this caveat….” If a student plugged that into AI, it could come out as, “Even with this problem, I still think that learning the four skills together is the best way to study a foreign language.”
The vocabulary is simpler, the tone is conversational, and it is incredibly difficult to prove the student didn’t write it themselves.
According to reports from NPR and other outlets, many schools are spending thousands of dollars on AI-detection software. Yet, research shows these tools are far from reliable and frequently produce false positives. Few things are more discouraging for students than working hard on a paper and then being accused of not writing it themselves.
It was a teacher-experience that I would have paid good money for. My students had been working individually. With one minute left in the class, I softly told them that it was time to stop for the day. Some of them sort of jumped when they heard my voice and looked at the clock. Then a few of them slowly started to pack up their stuff. But most of them continued to read and write, finally standing up a few minutes later.
On my way home, reflecting on what I had just observed in that class, I realized that my students were probably in a state of flow. Deconstructing the lesson, I noticed that it contained many of the characteristic that researchers say promote flow. And after seeing my students’ responses, I became determined to apply as much as I could to future lessons. And that is what I have tried to accomplish in the sample activities below.
Why should we care about flow? Research has found that people who reportedly experienced flow in an activity tend to spend more time doing it and do it better. Also, they do it for intrinsic reasons; in other words, they felt enjoyment and satisfaction from the activity itself.
My students who seemed to have been in a flow state were probably experiencing characteristic described by researchers. They lost a sense of time; what they were doing seemed effortless; and they were especially focused.
