Three Errors, Ten Minutes: Prioritizing Feedback
You are reviewing a short journal entry from a Chinese III student before a 10-minute individual feedback slot. The entry reads: '上周末我见面了我的中国朋友。我们先吃饭在一个小饭馆，然后去了故宫。故宫很大，我们走了三个小时。我朋友说，他以前没有去过故宫，所以他很高兴。我希望下次再去。' The class is working on narrative past tense, word order, and verb transitivity. The teacher has identified two likely errors: '见面了我的中国朋友' and '吃饭在一个小饭馆'. There are also smaller issues, such as the lack of a comma after '上周末' and inconsistent use of '了'. The teacher can target only one major pattern in the 10 minutes and can assign a short follow-up task. The student is otherwise strong in vocabulary and is preparing for a presentational writing assessment next week.
1. Which of the two major errors would you prioritize in 10 minutes, and why? Give a contrastive explanation you would use.
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I would prioritize '见面了我的中国朋友' because it is a high-frequency transitivity error that is likely to fossilize and that recurs whenever the student narrates meeting people. English 'meet someone' is transitive, so the student transfers the object directly to 见面. In Chinese, 见面 is intransitive: say '我跟我的朋友见面了' or '我见到了我的朋友'. The contrast is clean: 见 can take an object ('见到朋友'), but 见面 cannot take a direct object; it needs 跟/和 before the person. The error is not the 了 - '见面了' is fine in the right structure. I would write two pairs on the board: '我见面了我的朋友' → '我跟我的朋友见面了'; '我见到了我的朋友'. Then the student produces two new sentences about different people. The location error '吃饭在一个小饭馆' also matters, but it has a single positional rule - place phrases before the verb, '在一个小饭馆吃饭' - and can be handled with a quick recast and a follow-up note rather than the whole slot.
2. What quick assessment would show whether the student has internalized the target, and what would you do with the location error?
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I would use a short production check, not a recognition check. Ask the student to answer two questions aloud: '你上周末跟谁见面了？' and '你昨天在哪儿见到了你的朋友？' The first requires 跟/和…见面; the second allows 见到 with an object and checks whether the student can switch structures. Then ask for one written sentence about a different person, such as '我明天要跟我的老师见面'. I would look for spontaneous use in the next journal entry, not just correct repetition during the conference. For the location error, I would recast it once - '哦，你们在一个小饭馆吃饭' - and give a one-line rule: place phrases normally come before the verb. I would mark it in the margin but not spend the remaining minutes on it, because the transitivity pattern is the higher-transfer target for the upcoming presentational writing task.