What every writing teacher dreams of... A personal squad of Corrections Officers to help you cope with your essay feedback for students.
If you teach writing to your students, at some point you must have heard the cry from students, parents and institution for you to do more corrections when you give feedback about writing. The more the better. In fact, THE perfect writing teacher will manage to correct every mistake in every sentence for every student.
It doesn't seem to matter that doing every correction on an essay can often take as long (if not longer) than it took the student him/herself to actually write it to begin with. This is the sign of a good, hard-working, committed teacher who puts the language needs of the students above his/her own recreational time.
It is also the sign of a complete nufty. Pardon me for saying so.
There are a variety of reasons why correcting every mistake for a student on a one page essay is not a particularly effective method, but if you're wondering why, I'd like to suggest applying the following experiment with your next writing class...
1. After you have gathered up students' latest essays, ask them how many mistakes they think it would be a good idea for you to correct. (Bets are the answers will be "more" or "most" or even "all of them!")
2. Ask them WHY you should do this for them. (Probable answers will include things like "this will help me to improve my written English" though some will be more honest and say it will help them become better at grammar.)
3. Correct all (or at least most) of the mistakes on all the students' essays, and keep a careful track of exactly how long it takes to correct each essay and all the essays for the whole class overall. (This is going to hurt, but bear with me - you may not have to do this again in future!)
4. Distribute the essays back to the students.
5. One week later (or perhaps just before setting the next essay task), distribute a sheet of blank paper to each student and ask them to write out (to the best of their ability) all the mistakes and corrections you made on their last essay - without the benefit of actually looking at or referring to it. They don't have to be word for word or absolutely precise - we just want the essence of the mistake and correction given.
Right, at this point, the shock is probably going to start setting in. A couple of your more devout or incredibly fussy and committed learners may be able to come up with a bit of a list, but the odds are that the vast majority of your class will sit there looking stumped, not able to put more than a few meagre words on their paper.
I've done this with a variety of university classes, with very nice and committed students. The results were invariably verging on completely embarrassing.
6. Have students take out their previous essays (the ones you painstakingly corrected for them) and count up the number of corrections and reference the time you wrote down on it (for how long it took you to correct it).
7. Now ask students to compare these tallies with what they have on their review lists on the blank paper in front of them.
8. Ask the students to explain to you why you should correct all of their errors when:
(a) they don't appear to have remembered many (if any) of these corrections at all
(b) they expect you to spend (30) minuites doing corrections for them that will not eventuate in any language development
The main point here is that 10-30 corrections on an essay are almost never going to really sink in for learners. This style of writing correction - however common it is in our broader profession as teachers of English - is usually for appearances.
But students won't understand that until you show them.
My personal philosophy here is that:
1. There's no point correcting if it's just going to be like hitting 30 tennis balls over a net at the same time and asking my student to remember the trajectory and spin of each and every one of them.
2. There's no way my students are going to hold me hostage with 20 hours of language corrections per week if they're not going to try and remember and learn from them.
Following this little demonstration, my students usually agree with me that it's better to stick with 3-4 language use corrections, and make them useful ones that are worth remembering for future written work, with the rest of the feedback being about style, content, reader response, etc.
My learners do get it after this.
Unfortunately, parents (where applicable) and school management usually don't. They want us to be nufties whom they can then compliment on working so hard to "help" their learners...
:-)
