CATESOL Roundup, Part 7

Providing Corrective Feedback

My former colleagues from my Long Beach days Barbara Jonckheere, Karen Fox,and Rosemary Hiruma gave a well-attended presentation to address such common issues all writing teachers are faced with: to correct or not to correct, and how best to do error correction.

To determine what kind of corrective feedback students find most useful for improving their writing, Barbara, Karen, and Rosemary designed a 19-question survey for 542 credit students in two university-affiliated IEPs to fill out. The students ranged from intermediate to advanced levels.

Key findings from the research project indicate that peer editing is not popular, as most students picked "least preferred" for Question 9, which asked "Do you want another student to help you fix your writing before you give it to the teacher?" With resistance to peer editing came a nod to the workshop format where the students wanted the teacher to correct a student's writing (with no name on it) with the whole class and to show them good models of real student writing (also anonymously). The results also show that students wanted the teacher to highlight mistakes so they could fix them themselves.

Informed by these findings, Karen's solutions take the form of something called "Karen's Complaints." She would jokingly complain about student mistakes, hand her students papers with anonymous incorrect sentences from their papers, and have them correct the errors on the board. She would also have her students circle target language structure such as noun clauses in the reading selections before they write to apply the structure. She also encourages her students to use tutors, even though some complain about tutors not helping if they only coach.

Other suggestions offered by Karen and her co-presenters include:

• stop using codes and start using different color highlighters
• use limited marginal comments
• list some errors at the bottom of a student paper
• provide class time to review the errors
• give students time to correct the errors 
• use a rubric: provide it before writing and staple it behind corrected writing
• have students self-grade according to the rubric using a pencil
• have students keep an editing log or portfolio for tracking their errors and review it once every three weeks or with each assignment

I totally agree with the presenters that we don't want to raise a generation of frightened writers by raising their affective filter. To that end, their suggested practices are certainly worth a try.

(To be continued.)