Why Copying Correctly Matters More Than You Think

ESL-Wise Blog 16

Why Copying Correctly Matters More Than You Think

By Alan David Pritchard

Every lesson in my classroom used to start the same way. Students opened their notebooks and copied down the learning objectives and that day’s date. It was a small ritual, something that set the tone for the lesson. I never thought much about it until I began leafing back through their notebooks. I just assumed they were copying correctly.

What I saw startled me.

Dates were copied with missing letters. Objectives were altered in subtle ways. A word like analyse became anlyse. Compare turned into comper. Over time, I noticed the same thing with basic vocabulary too. The days of the week appeared again and again in notebooks as Teusday, Thersday, Wensday.

What I had assumed was a simple act of recording information had quietly become a breeding ground for fossilised errors. They were simply not copying correctly.

That was the day I stopped seeing copying as background noise. I realised that if students copy inaccurately, they are practising mistakes. Each slip of the pen reinforces a version of English that is just slightly off. And because they see it in their own writing, it feels correct to them.

By the time I step in to correct it, the error is already ingrained.

Some teachers in mainstream classrooms do not check or mark student work unless it is a formal assessment. The danger is that fossilised errors are left to harden without intervention. A spelling mistake copied every day can easily become permanent.

I have seen notebooks filled with uncorrected tsday and thersday because no one took the time to notice them. By the time an assessment arrives, the mistake has already been practised a hundred times.

That is why I developed a colour-coded system.

When I write a corrected word on the board, I always break it into colour segments, and the students have to copy it using the same colours.

If a learner has written tsday, I will put ts in black and UE in red. The missing sound is now visible, and they reproduce it the same way in their notebooks.

Here is an example of my using colour coding for dates.

With Wednesday, I write Wed in one colour, nes in another, and day in a third. Students must copy it exactly as they see it, colour for colour.

This slows them down and forces them to attend to every part of the word. Over time, those visual distinctions help the correct spelling to take hold.

Teachers often downplay copying correctly.

It is easy to call it mechanical, low-level, even lazy teaching. But copying correctly is precision training.

It forces learners to notice each letter, to attend to small but significant details, and to hold patterns in working memory. Spelling Wednesday correctly is less about rote memorisation than about training the eye and ear to work together until the word becomes automatic.

Second language acquisition research supports this.

Richard Schmidt’s Noticing Hypothesis shows that attention is the starting point of learning. Merrill Swain’s Output Hypothesis highlights that producing language, even as simple as copying, helps learners recognise gaps in their knowledge.

From a sociocultural perspective, copying is a scaffolded practice: the learner leans on the model until they can manage it independently.

In practice, “copy carefully” is rarely enough. I have had to turn copying itself into a task that matters. A short passage on the board can become a board relay, with groups racing to reproduce it without a single error.

Peer-checking notebooks turns copying into a social process. Highlighting difficult spellings in colour can make a complex word easier to absorb. Encouraging students to look up, hold a phrase in memory, then write it down helps them copy more accurately and builds short-term recall.

Copying correctly also matters beyond the day’s objectives. In exams, I have seen students lose marks because they miscopied a title or a key word from the question. One memorable case was a student who consistently copied college as collage. It took weeks of patient correction to untangle that habit, and I was reminded again how much power this low-level skill really has.

So when I look at those notebooks filled with slightly misspelled dates and objectives, I see more than carelessness. I see a reminder that small mistakes, if repeated, become permanent companions.

Copying correctly is not about keeping students busy. It is about accuracy, memory, and respect for the written word.

And when treated seriously, it can sharpen focus in ways that echo far beyond the opening minutes of a lesson.

Further Reading

• ApplingTESOL – “Schmidt’s Noticing Hypothesis: A Summary”https://applingtesol.wordpress.com/2022/10/21/schmidts-noticing-hypothesis-a-summary/

• Spellzone – “Spelling Strategies for Visual Learners”https://www.spellzone.com/blog/spelling_strategies_for_visual_learners.htm

• The Literacy Nest – “Why We Code Words”https://www.theliteracynest.com/2025/01/why-we-code-words.html

  
  

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