Diagnosing error patterns in a mixed-L1 Class IX English section
You teach English to Class IX in a residential school where most students speak Santali at home and study in an English-medium stream. Your section has 42 students. After a 120-word paragraph task ("Describe a festival you enjoy"), you tabulate the errors: 24 scripts contain strings such as "I am go to village" or "He is come tomorrow"; 17 omit articles entirely ("He bought new cycle"); 9 transfer Santali word order ("Yesterday I market went"); only 6 use a subordinating conjunction correctly; only 4 punctuate direct speech correctly. Oral reading of a Class VII text shows 30 of the 42 decode fluently, but only 11 can retell it in their own words. Attendance runs at about 88 per cent because several families migrate for roughly two weeks each term, and those students miss your Friday lessons. You have six periods a week, a prescribed unit on paragraph writing that the half-yearly examination will test in four weeks, and two 30-minute evening study slots.
1. Decide whether the dominant pattern is L1 interference, a developmental stage of interlanguage, or a teaching artefact. Which features of the data support and which undermine each explanation, and what would you check in one period to settle it?
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The three explanations predict different error distributions, so test the distribution rather than the individual error.
L1 interference predicts word-order transfer ("Yesterday I market went") and omission of articles if Santali has no article system. Only 9 of 42 show word order transfer, so interference explains a minority pattern, not the dominant one.
Developmental interlanguage predicts overgeneralisation of the copula and progressive: "I am go" is the learner treating am as a general tense carrier, and "He is come" is a present-perfect form built without auxiliary selection. These are classic developmental errors and they dominate (24 scripts). The article omissions (17) are also typical of learners who have not yet stabilised the definite/indefinite distinction.
Teaching artefact is supported by the comprehension gap: 30 decode but only 11 retell. That suggests decoding has been drilled while meaning-making has not, so the writing errors may reflect impoverished input rather than a rule deficit.
To settle it: in one period, give a 10-item oral gap-fill on the same structures with pictures, then a 40-word dictated retell. If students self-correct when the item is decontextualised but not in free writing, it is a performance/input problem, not a competence gap - and your remediation should be more reading and retelling, not more grammar drilling.
2. You cannot fix everything in four weeks. Choose the two error types to target, the ones to postpone, and justify the choice on frequency, learnability and examination payoff.
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Rank by three criteria: how many scripts it affects, how quickly a rule can be made visible, and whether the half-yearly paragraph task will penalise it.
Target 1 - the copula/auxiliary pattern (24 scripts). Highest frequency, and the rule is teachable in two cycles: subject + be + noun/adjective versus subject + verb, contrasted with the present perfect. Because the error occurs in the majority of scripts and in every paragraph, each week of delay costs the most marks.
Target 2 - articles (17 scripts). Second most frequent and low learnability for full mastery, but a small, closed rule set (first mention a, subsequent mention the, generic plural with no article) gives visible short-term gains in an examiner's eye. Worth a light, repeated treatment rather than a full unit.
Postpone - word order (9 scripts) and direct-speech punctuation (4 scripts). Word order affects a fifth of the class and often self-corrects with reading volume; punctuation of direct speech is a narrow item likely to appear as one 2-mark question, so it gets one focused drill in week 4, not a teaching cycle. Spending equal time on all five errors would leave the two high-frequency ones half-learned, which is the worst outcome given the four-week horizon.
3. Design the assessment and the catch-up mechanism so that the migrating students' absence does not corrupt your evidence about whether the intervention worked.
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The risk is that your post-test compares a full-attendance group in week 4 with a group that missed two Fridays, so any gain is confounded with attendance.
Assessment design: use a 15-minute fortnightly writing probe - the same task type, a different prompt, blind-marked against three fixed criteria (copula/auxiliary accuracy per 100 words, article accuracy, one subordinate clause attempted). Keep the raw scripts in a folder so each student's trajectory, not just the class mean, is visible. Record attendance against each probe.
Catch-up design: do not rely on the Friday lesson for anything sequenced. Put the core rule input in Monday and Tuesday periods; make Friday the application and feedback day, delivered as a printed half-sheet that a returning student can complete with a peer tutor in the evening slot. Pair each frequently absent student with a named peer who keeps a duplicate sheet.
Reporting: report two figures - mean gain for students attending at least four probes, and mean gain for the rest - and state the attendance. If the low-attendance group gains less, you have a delivery problem to solve rather than evidence that the method failed.