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CIIAPTER 8

comments we offer students need to appear helpful and not censorious. Sometjmes they will be in the margin of tlie students’ work or, on a Computer, they can be written as viewable comments either by using an editing program or by writing in comments in a different colour. If we want to offer morę extensive comments, we may need a separate piece of paper - or separate Computer documcnt. Consider this cxample in which the teacher is responding in the form of a letter to a student’s first draft of a contposition abont New Ycars Eve:

Dsar Gabrielie.

I really enjoyeci reading.yoiir draft: You haye Sonie good expressions, e.g.

.. you look to the dark $ky and it sięerps Jike a speęial'party Why don't you begir witfi that sentsrics? e.g.

I iooked upat the dark sky and it seemed a spada! party, tt was liks on expiosior\ evary.where. Peopte werethrowihg hrewórks ima the sky, and eyerywhere ttierc were tlghts.

fiow at this po>nt you can tell the reefiar what night it is;

It waś New Yhar's €ve r,nd everyoro was ceiehraiing.

Then you can exp)ain wha: New Year's Eve nieans in tlriiguay, how foniliesańćf friends tonie togetł-st and how everyone fias hopes for the futurę. You can śnd by coming back to the idea of hreworks.

You can orgar	se your essay to haye two times
Past	/ Iooked up...	Introcfuctior
	it seemed
General	Family celebrations in
present	Uruguay are very important. Peopie usually send greetingś to each.óther...
Past	????	Cońclusion

figurę 4: From Process Writing by R White and V Arndt (Pearson Education Ltd)

This type of feedback takes time, of course, but it can be morę useful to the student than a draft covered in correction marks. It is designed specifically for situations in which the student will go back and review the draft before producing a new version.

When we respond to a finał written product (an essay or a finished project), we can say what we liked, how we fclt about the text and what we think the students might do next time if they are going to write something similar.

Another constructive way of responding to students’ written work is to show' alternative ways of writing through reformulation (see C2 above). Instead of providing the kind of comments in the example above, we might say, I wotild express thisparagraph slightly differently from you, and then re-writc it, keeping the original intention as far as possible, but avoiding any of the language or construction problems which the students original contained. Such reformulation is extremely useful for students sińce by comparing their version with yours they discover a lot about the language. However, it bas to be done sympathetically, sińce we might end up ‘steamrollering’ our own view of things, forcing the student to adopt a different voice from the one they wanted to ttse.

D2 Correcting

Many teachcrs use correclion codes to ind i ca te thal students have madę mistakes in their written work. These codes can be written into the body of the text itself or in the margin. This makes correction much neater and less threatening than random marks and comments. Different teachers use different symbols, but Figurę 5 shows some of the morę common ones.

Symbol	Meaning	Example error
5	A spelling error	The asnwer is obvious
W0	A mistake in word order	I like verv much it.
G	A grammar mistake	I ani going to buy some fumitures.
T	Wrong verb tense	I have scen him yesterday.
C	Concord mistake (e.g. the subject and verb agreement)	People is angry.
r~ a	Something has been left out.	He told A that he was sorry.
ww	Wrong word	I am interestedonjazz musie.
{}	Something is not necessary.	He was not jtool strong enough.
?M	The meaning is unclear.	That is a verv excited photoęraph.
P	A punctuation mistake.	Do you like /ondon.
F/l	Too formal or informal.	Hi Mr Franklin, Thank you for your łetter...

figurę 5: Correction symbols

In order for students to benefit from the use of symbols such as these, they need to be trained in their use (see D3 below).

We can also correct by putting ticks against good points (or another appropriate symbol, such as, for example, a circle if the lessons are taking place in Japan) and underlining problems. We can write summarising comments at the end of a student’s work saying what was appropriate and what needs correcting.

D3 Training students

If students are to benefit from our feedback on their writing, they need to know what we mean and what to do about it. This involves training them to understand the process.

We might start by writing incorrect sentences on the board, such as *7 dont enjoy to watch TV. Students come up to the board and underline the mistake in the sentence (e.g. / don’t enjoy to watch TV). Activities like this get them used both to the idea of error-spotting and also to the convention of underlining. Later we can give them several sentences, some of which are correct and some of which are not. They have to decide which is which.

We can now introduce students to correction symbols. We can go through them one by one, showing examples of each category. Once we think students have grasped their meaning, we might get them to try using the symbols themselves. In the following example (Figurę 6), the teacher has typed up some student work exactly as it was written by different members of a group. The story is on an overhead transparency. Students from a different group tried to use the correclion symbols (sec Figurę 5) they had recently learnt about to correct the piece, with partial success:

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