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□nce upon a time, a beautif princess lived in a castle by a river.

She was very clever.

She aiways read and studied.

However, she hasn^seen thenaturę around her, where she was liying,

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she had a stembther thćit hate her very rnuch.

She had a loveiy dog. it was a very loyalty. Gr

One day, her stepmother bought a basket of red apples fronn the local market. The stepmother putted poison in/apples.

Her dog saw what tfte stepmother do, so, when the stepmother gave the

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apple to her, her dog jumped and ate the apple. Then, the / dog died.

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figurę 6: Students use correction symbols

The teacher then discussed the students’ efforts with the class.

Once students havc had a good chanee to get to know how to use correction symbols, we can start to use them when looking at students’ work.

D4 invoh/mg students

So far we have discussed the teacher’s feedback to students. But we can also encourage students to give feedback to each other. Such peer review has an extremely positive effect on group cohesion. It encourages students to monitor each other and, as a result, helps them to become better at self monitoring. James Muncie suggests a further advantage, namely that whereas students see teacher comment as coming fforn an expert, as a result of which they feel obliged to do what is suggested, even when we are only making suggestions, they are much morę likely to be provoked into thinking about what they are writing if the feedback comes front one of their peers (Muncie 2000). Thus when responding to work during the drafting stage, peer feedback is potentially extremely beneficial. However, in order to make surę that the comment is focused, we migltt want to design a form such as the one suggested by Victoria Chan (2001) where students are given sentences to complete such as My immediate reactions lo your piece of writing are..., I like tlie part..., J’m not surę aboutThe specific language errors l have noticed are..., etc.

In her book on writing, Tricia Hedge suggests letting the students dccide (with teacher guidance) what they think the most important things to look out for in a piece of writing are (Hedge 1988: 54). They can give their opinions about whether spelling is morę important than handwriting, or whether originality of ideas should interest the feedback giver morę than, say, grammatical correctness. They can be asked for their opinions on the best grading system, too. In consultation with the teacher, therefore, they can come up with theihown feedback kit.

We can also encourage students to self monitor by getting them (o write a checklist of things to look out for when they evaluate their own work during the drafting process (Harmer 2004: 121). The morę we encourage them to be involved in giving feedback to each other, or to evaluate their own work successfully, the better they will be able to develop as successful writers.

Finishing the feedback process

Except where students are taking achicvement tcsts (see Chapter 22, Al), written feedback is designed not just to give an assessment of the students’ work, but also to help and teach. We give feedback because we want to afrect our students’ language use in the futurę as well as comment upon its use in the past. This is the formative assessment we mentioned briefly at the begiitning of this chapter. When we respond to first and second written drafts of a written assignment, thereforc, we expcct a new version to be produced which will show how the students have responded to our comments. In this way feedback is part of a learning process, and we will not have wasted our time. Our rcason for using codes and symbols is the same: if students can identify the mistakes they have madę, they are then in a position to correct them. The feedback process is only really finished once they have madę these changes. And if students consult grammar books or dictionaries as a way of resohńng somc of the mistakes we have signalled for them, the feedback we have given has had a posilive outeome.

If, on the contrary, when we return corrected work, the students put it straight into a file or lose it, then the time we spent responding or correcting has been completely wasted.

Burning the midnight oil

'Why bum the midnight oil?’ asks Icy Lee (20osb) in an article which discusses the stress of written feedback for students and teachers. For students, the sight of their work covered in corrections can cause great anxiety. For teachers, marking and correcting take up an enormous amount of time (Lee found that the 200 Hong Kong teachers she interviewed spent an average of 20-30 hours a week marldng). Both teachers and students deserve a break from this drudgery.

Along with other commentators, Lee has a number of ways of varying the amount of marking and the way teachers do it. These include:

•    Selective marking: we do not need to mark everything all the time. If we do, it takes a great deal of time and can be extremely demotivating. It is often far morę effective to tell students that for their next piece of work we will be focusing specifically on spelling, or specifically on paragraph organisation, or on verb tenses, for example. We will have less to correct, the students will havc tewer red marks to contend with, and while they preparing their work, students will give extra special attention to the area we have identified.

•    Different error codcs: there is no reason why students and teachers should always use the same error codes {see 1)2 above). At different levels and for different tasks we may want to make shorter lists of possible errors, or tailor what we are looking at for the class in question.

« Don’t mark all the papers: teachers may decide only to mark some of the Scripts they are given - as a sample of what the class has done as a wholc. They can then use what they find there for post-task teaching with the whole class.

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