This is an excellent tool for upper elementary and middle school students. It is especially helpful when working with Deaf and Hard of Hearing students for whom English grammar can be particularly challenging. Many of the morphological markers and function words are hard to hear and are not represented in ASL, at least not in the same way.
While this activity was intended to be an individualized paper/pencil task, I typically make it a group activity on my whiteboard with dry erase markers. We do two sentences each time. I typically let the students know how many mistakes they need to find, and make sure the number of mistakes is equal to or greater than the number of students participating so that everyone gets a turn. If I know that one or two of my students finds this type of task very difficult, I usually call on them first. This gives them more possible response options, and often the opportunity for something basic like an uppercase letter at the beginning or a period at the end. When a student does identify an error, I always ask them to explain why, giving me the English rule. I will give hints when they can't find all the mistakes. This past week with my 6th graders I put a sentence on the board that used the wrong there/their/they're twice. When they couldn't find the error I "English signed" it as it was written. The ASL interpreters got a good laugh and the kids all looked at me like I was completely nuts...but they got the point.
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