To prompt or not to prompt, that is the question.

From the video of Dr. Schwartz, he mentioned an important method

that beginning readers use to recognize print words. That is making
readers to think Am I right? or Does this sound right? or Does
this make sense? after being prompted by the teacher, then they
do self-correction. It is an effective way to promote the word
recognition capacity of our students. But there must be a
precondition before we proceed, the beginning readers have to have
sufficient listening/meaning vocabularies from their daily speech. AS
ESL students, they dont have it.
After years of teaching English as a second language to Chinese
students, I came to realize that I have to find a way to establish an
English language habit system in my students mind. We call it
the language sense which is exactly the same thing that English
native speakers acquire from their daily speech. Reciting the texts is
a wonderful way. My students wont say sentences like I is happy
or I have much books after repeatedly reading aloud and reciting
the text to me. This process of reading and reciting makes these
wrong sentences just sound not right as Dr. Schwartz has said in
the video. Then, here comes the dilemma for me: Do I have to
prompt my students when they are making mistakes in their reading
or reciting? They will be discouraged if I stop them and prompt the
mistakes by asking them whether the sentence sound right. But if I
just ignore the mistakes and let them continue, a wrong language
habit will be formed and confirmed in their mind, which is hard to
correct in the future.
The Running Record gives me a perfect solution to my question. I
can easily divide my students into different groups by implement
this method. For the group of the best readers whose Error Ratio is
lower than 1:20, I tend not to stop the students to prompt the errors.
It would be better to let the readers to self-correct. This would
deepen the memory of certain words or expressions in readers
minds. For the group of good readers whose Error Ratio is lower
than 1:10, I think prompting the readers only when they make
mistakes in structures or basic grammar would be a wise move. I
can still give them chances to self-correct in minor mistakes in
pronunciation or simple grammar like This is a apple. For the
group of help-needed readers, prompting can be essentially
important. They will form and establish a wrong language habit of
English by reading and repeating the wrong words and sentences.
Correcting them from making any mistake in reading is necessary
for them.