Tracking which words your students keep mispronouncing
Every experienced teacher carries a mental list of the words their class mangles. The list is real and useful — it is just stored in the worst possible place.
7 min readKeep a written record of recurring mispronunciations rather than a mental one, and keep it per student rather than only for the class. A class list tells you what to drill on Monday; a per-student list tells you which three words a particular child should practise, which is where the actual improvement happens.
The problem with the list in your head
The standard advice is sound: notice the pronunciation errors your class makes repeatedly, and teach them explicitly rather than correcting one student at a time. Some teachers keep a running list on the classroom wall.
It works, and it has three limits that are hard to get around by trying harder.
- It is biased toward the loud. You notice the errors of students who speak up. The quiet ones mispronounce words too — you just never hear them.
- It merges everyone. "The class struggles with -ed endings" is useful. It is not the same as knowing that four specific students do, and the rest moved past it a month ago.
- It resets. What you noticed in October is gone by February, and next year's class starts the list again from nothing.
A wall list is a good idea implemented with the only tool available. The idea deserves better storage.
Why per-student changes what you can do
A class list supports one action: teach the thing to everyone. That is worth doing, but it spends everyone's time on a problem some of them do not have.
A per-student list supports something better. You can hand a child three words that are actually theirs. Practice stops being generic and starts being short, specific and finishable — which is the difference between a student doing it and a student meaning to.
- Three words this child keeps getting wrong
- Practice is short enough to actually complete
- Progress is visible to the student — the word drops off
- Includes the quiet students you would never have heard
- Whole-class drilling, some of whom solved it weeks ago
- Skews toward whoever talks most in lessons
- No way to show an individual they improved
- Rebuilt from scratch each year
- thorough6 times
- clothes5 times
- vegetable4 times
- rhythm3 times
What to do with the list once you have it
A list nobody acts on is just a record of failure, so decide in advance what triggers what.
- 1Look for patterns, not words. Five students struggling with *thought*, *through* and *thorough* do not have three problems. They have one sound.
- 2Teach the pattern to the class; give the words to the student. The sound is a five-minute whole-class slot. The specific words are individual practice.
- 3Cap it at three. A student handed twelve words practises none of them.
- 4Let words leave the list. The most motivating thing a struggling student can see is a word disappearing because they fixed it.
How the list builds itself in Dily
Every time a student reads aloud as part of their practice, the words that gave them trouble are noted. Over a few weeks that becomes a list of the words each student runs into most often, with how many times each one has come up.
Nothing extra is marked to produce it. It is a by-product of practice the student was doing anyway, which matters — a tracking system that costs teacher time is a tracking system that stops after three weeks.
- You see the list for any student, alongside the rest of their work.
- Students see their own, so the target is theirs rather than something being done to them.
- It covers the whole class, including the students who never volunteer an answer.
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