I �m a fairly new member here and I have been browsing the worksheets on the forums . I want to make sure I have a good selection of worksheets to use when my partner and I start voluntary ESL work later this year.

Some of the worksheets are really excellent and I am looking forward to having enough points to download them. However others are poor with spelling and grammatical errors.

As a native English speaker and a teacher, this makes me squirm a little. I tried to find some way of pointing out these errors but I could not find any link.

I even wrote politely to a contributor in December to let her know that her powerpoint exercise had a major error but she hasn �t corrected it and there have now been 33 downloads of this incorrect exercise.

The mistake was..."There were not ..... food or drink ." The student has to fill in the blank with �much �or �many � . The problem lies with "There were not" which should be � �There was not".

 This is a very basic grammatical error and I don �t like to think of 33 other teachers using it with their pupils.

 

Can anyone tell me if it is posible to have such errors corrected?

Thanks HH.

 

I know it �s frustrating to find mistakes in a ws, but it happens to all of us (2 days ago, I gave a ws to my pupils I had made myself, and I realized that there was a small mistake - "my" instead of "her" - but I had already done all my photocopies, I had my pupils correct it, but some spotted it before I said anything...)...

 

what you can do is write a comment, so that others will see it when they download the ws!

 

but don �t worry too much, i �m sure most teachers check the ws they download before giving them to their pupils!!! or at least I hope so!

Elodie

I �m not a native speaker... I think native speakers, which surely are more proficient, should collaborate with other teachers by telling them kindly there �s sthg to be changed

It happened to me once that I typed in a worksheet �sheeps � as a plural of �sheep � Then a native speaker made me realize it was wrong, I edited it and I felt happy because...the mistake was corrected

As far as I am concerned, comments are welcomed and... I don �t receive feedback THAT often. Either I don �t make mistakes or I make them and nobody tells me about it Good topic hollandhaggis!

I know I make sure that all my texts are editable when I upload, leaving the choice to change sentences or correct mistakes and I never hand out a printable to my students without reading it first and making the exercise myself.

 

I think every teacher who downloads a worksheet has a responsibility to make useful comments about it.  Everybody likes to get a "thank you" after a download, but if people would make more detailed comments, everybody would benefit from them.  I try to do this, and I make corrections when I see a glaring mistake, but I want people to know that I do it for the good of everyone and not in order to criticize.  I am a native English speaker--a �domino � among many; our effect can be far-reaching if we don �t keep everything to ourselves.  As for those of you who are prone to make mistakes because you need more practice, if you make it known that you welcome the corrections, you will open the door for others to freely correct you and you will learn more and advance on the road to perfecting your English--both yours and your students �! 

 

Thanks for this topic, hollandhaggis!