Correcting Students’ Writing

(TESOL Ideas--Writing)

            For my first several years as a TESOL teacher, I would respond to students’ writing by going through and correcting every single mistake.  It was long hard work, and it was made all the more frustrating by the fact that I knew most of the students didn’t go through their paper and thoroughly study my corrections.  As one of my colleagues put it, “They just glance at the score at the bottom, then fold the paper in half and put it in their bag and never look at it again.”  So it was hard to escape the feeling that I was doing all this work for nothing.  But I felt like I had to do it because to not do it would be to shirk my duties as a teacher.

           

            Another one of my colleagues actually went so far as to conduct a poll with one of his classes.  “Guys, I want an honest answer, and I’m not going to be mad, I’m not going to penalize you, I just want to know, for my own benefit, how many of you actually look at all the corrections I make on your writing?” he asked them.  Out of a class of 20, he claims only a couple students raised their hand.  “Thank you,” he told them, “You’ve just explained to me why your writing never improves.”

           …Actually, you can’t really blame the students.  It’s human nature.  When I was a student, I was the same.  My professors and teachers would write loads of comments in the margins.  I tended to pay attention to the positive comments only, largely ignore any negative comments, and then just look at the score at the end.  It’s just what most people do.

            Anyways, I’ve discovered the only way to get students to pay attention to corrections is to make them re-write their essays.  So that’s what I do now.

           

            My process works like this.  Students hand in their writing.  I go through and underline any problematic passages.  For this step, I only use two kinds of marks.  I underline parts to indicate there’s some sort of problem.  Or I insert a caret mark (^) to indicate something is missing.  (For some of the students, pretty much their whole paper ends up being underlined, but I’m ok with that.)

            The next class, I hand out a sheet of paper containing one sentence from each student’s paper (These are the original sentences without any of my underlinings or caret marks).  I tell the class that each sentence contains at least one mistake (and in some cases several mistakes) and they have to go through and find the mistakes and correct them.  I have them do this in small groups first, and then we discuss it as a class.

            All the sentences are anonymous, so the students don’t have to feel embarrassed about their particular sentence.  (To lighten the mood, I’ll tell the students that they don’t have to tell the class which sentence is theirs, and in fact if they want to completely avoid suspicion, when we get to their sentence they should yell out something like, “This sentence is terrible!  Whose terrible sentence is this?”—and then no one will suspect it is theirs.  This usually gets a laugh.)

            After we’ve gone through the list of sentences as a class, then I hand back their writing.  For this step, I put the students into pairs.  For each pair, I only give back the writing for one partner at a time.  The pairs work through the writing together, and discuss all the mistakes.  Then when they’ve finished discussing, I give them the writing for the second partner.

            During this time I try and stay back a bit so the students are encouraged to correct their own mistakes without asking me.  Ideally during this stage they use only their own resources to do the corrections, but I don’t make a sacred cow out of it either—that is, if a student feels they need to ask a question about how to correct a sentence, I don’t refuse to answer it.

            Once all the papers have been discussed in pairs, the students are assigned to correct their papers and hand in the second draft to me as homework.

            The second draft is corrected in a similar way, but this time I error code any remaining problems in addition to underlining them—that is, I’ll write in whether the problem is with a wrong word, verb tense, noun form, et cetera.  [My error coding sheet is over here.]  The students are assigned to re-write the paper again, and give me a third draft.

            If there are any remaining problems on the third draft, at this point I’ll write in the corrections myself.

            I find this process works fairly well.  I had a colleague who told me he could never do this because it took so much of his time just to mark 1 draft, so he couldn’t imagine going through 3 drafts of every writing.  But I think it saves me time.  Or at the very least, does not take up any more time than it used to when I took it upon myself to try to repair all the mistakes in all the students’ writing. 

            (It takes a lot of time and energy to try to rewrite all the problem sentences in student writing—it is much easier for me to just underline the mistakes, and encourage the students to fix it themselves.)

Notes

* I only do this for General English classes or for IELTS classes.  For EAP classes, I do the standard 4 drafts: Self-editing, peer-editing, teacher feedback, final draft.  I use the worksheets linked above to facilitate this.

* For Young Learner classes, I try to avoid demotivating them by marking up their papers.  I generally view writing tasks as fluency building exercises, and don’t focus on grammatical accuracy.  Following from a suggestion from I.S.P. Nation, I respond to the content of their message with a comment at the end, but don’t correct their grammar.  Or alternatively, I will write up a corrected version of their writing, and invite them to compare the two versions (as with here and here).

* This concept of multiple drafts obviously works best when the students are doing their writing on a word-processor, and when possible I encourage them to do this.  For classes, or for individual students, where it is not possible to do use a word processor, I give them the option of using this sheet here so that they do not have to re-write their whole paper, but only the mistakes.

Update April 5, 2015
I've been doing writing practice with very young learners recently, and they don't have the patience to quietly work through a list of common mistakes.  So I made a game out of it.  There are two teams, I put one sentence on the power point which contains a mistake.  The sentences all come from real errors made in the student writing assigned in the previous class.  The first team to spot the mistake gets a point.
Although I did this for young learners, it struck me that it would probably make my adult classes more fun as well.
A sample power point for this game (used for very young learners) is embedded below.



Update Update: April 21, 2015
After attending a workshop in which the presenter reminded us of how important it is to give positive as well as negative feedback, I've started including examples of one positive sentence example from each piece of student writing before going on to highlight mistakes.  Below is an example: