Study partners/ Study groups
You can combine correcting other people's errors with having your own corrected by getting together with other people to correct each others' work. As even native speakers find it difficult to edit their own work, you will find that you instantly agree with most of the corrections your partners make. If there are disagreements about which form is right, there are several ways of researching it:
- Google the two possible forms and check which one is more common. For example, if you Google "the same than" and then "the same as", the latter has one thousand times as many results and so is obviously correct. If the result isn't so clear or you think it could be a common mistake even for native speakers, try the same thing with a Google Books search. It is important to always use quotations marks ("") around the search terms to make sure the words are together on the page.
- Google it as a question. For example, searching for "Is staff countable or uncountable?" brings up lots of people trying to answer this.
- Leave a question on an ESL forum, e.g. http://www.usingenglish.com/forum/
- Leave a query on a site which specialises in answering questions, e.g. Yahoo Answers.
- Look it up in a grammar book, e.g. by searching for it in the index
- Ask a teacher, perhaps before or after the class if it is something that the other students wouldn't be interested in.