Error Correction Frontier: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Discussion (#143269), Second Language Writing IS

Sat. March 28, 2009, 7 am, CCC Room 405, TESOL 2009, Denver, CO USA

Thomas Leverett, CESL, So. Illinois Univ.-Carbondale

Heidi R. Wright, OPIE, Ohio University

Website of this presentation: http://www.siu.edu/~cesl/teachers/pd/ecf.html

 

Questions:

  1. What positive experience do you have with grammatical correction? What negative experience do you have with it?
  2. What research are you willing to share with us? In what direction(s) is research going?
  3. If you're against correction and your student wants it or asks for it, what do you do? What kinds of comments have you heard from students about their own view of this? What different ways of dealing with this are there?

4.   If teaching grammar and editing student work have no influence on grammatical acquisition, what does? What possible explanations are there for what studies have found?

5.    Is it possible teachers have their own reasons for editing, besides the assumption that it helps the student's grammar?

  1. What effect does grammar-check have on the practice of grammatical correction?  Do you encourage its use or require its removal? Do you explain its shortcomings? How will that change in the future?
  2. Do students submit better work when they use spell and grammar check?
  3. How do grammar-check and spell-check affect their acquisition?
  4. How many  proofreader's marks do students understand? Do you have a code of your own that you use?  Which marks do you find yourself writing/ explaining most often?
  5. How do you format feedback? correction codes? letters to students? comment lists with + and -, conferences, sentences from student essays on overhead? rubrics?
  6. How do you present feedback? cursive? print? red pen? another color? highlighter? On a computer? Have you noticed whether it has made a difference?
  7. Where do you write feedback/editing comments? in the margins, between lines/paragraphs, on a separate sheet, on a rubric, end of assignment?
  8. What kind of feedback do you give? grammar? organization? content? In what order if multiple drafts?
  9.  Do you use a particular order for grammar correction such as is suggested by Benson and Byrd? Frag and Run-ons first, then other things?
  10. Do you indicate what kind of mistake has been made? to what extent? What do you do about idioms/collocations and prepositions you think students may not be able to find?
  11. Do you tend to word comments is a negative or positive way? Which gets better results in subsequent drafts?
  12. Which do you offer more of: negative or positive feedback? Why?
  13. Do you mark every grammatical error?  Which ones do you mark/ignore? Why or why not?
  14. Do you have a philosophy of editing? What is it?  (I do: Try to make the fewest number of comments that will create the biggest amount of improvement.)
  15. Do you teach students to edit their own work? How do you feel about error correction journals or revision checklists? Have you had success with this?
  16. Is it possible to give too much feedback?
  17. Should we expect/teach them to strive for native-like perfection or can we accept some quaint expressions that are directly translated?
  18. At what point does the assignment cease to belong the student?  (I have heard professors comment that "after more than 3  drafts, I feel like I am grading myself")
  19. Do you ever show students multiple drafts of your own work?
  20. This has been a hot issue in the past. Why does it draw out such passionate feelings?
  21. Is compromise possible on this issue? Are writing faculty likely to be split or stay split on it?

Editing workbooks:

1.    Lumpkins, J. (2005). The Prentice Hall Editing Workbook. Amazon.

2.   Cain  (2002). Eye on Editing 1 and 2 (Longman)

3.   Routman. Writing Essentials (Heinemann)

4.   Byrd & Benson. Improving the Grammar of Written English. Wadsworth Publishers (out of print)

5.   Meyers, A.  (2004). Gateways to Academic Writing- a lot of editing practice included  (Longman)

6.   Porter, P. (2004). Read, Write and Edit: Grammar for College Writers (Heinle, was Houghton Mifflin)

Bibliography

1.    Bitchener, J. (2008). Evidence in support of written corrective feedback. Journal of Second Language Writing, 17(1), 102-118

2.   Deluca, G., Fox, L, Johnson, M. & Kogen, M. (2001). Dialogue on Writing: Rethinking ESL, Basic Writing and First-Year Composition. Lawrence Erlbaum.

3.   Ferris, D. (2007, Oct.). Preparing teachers to respond to student writing. Journal of Second Language Writing, 16, 3, Sept. 2007. Online at ScienceDirect, SIUC Library.

4.   Kietlinska, K. (2006). Revision and ESL Students (pdf). In Revision: History, Theory and Practice, A. Horning and A. Becker, eds. http://wac.colostate.edu/books/horning_revision/.

5.   Leki, I. (1992). Understanding ESL Writers: A Guide for Teachers. Boynton & Cook.  (chs. 9 & 10)

6.   Nelson, M. (1991). At the Point of Need. Heinemann Boynton/Cook Publishers, Portsmouth NH. Available at Amazon.

7.   Peterson, J. and Hagen, S. (1999).  Better Writing through Editing. McGraw-Hill.

8.   Raimes, A. (2004). Grammar Troublespots.  Cambridge Univ. Press.

  1. Truscott, J. and Hsu, A. (2008, Dec.). Error correction, revision, and learning. Journal of Second Language Writing 17, 4, pp. 292-305.
  2. Truscott, J. (1996). The case against grammar correction in L2 writing classes. Language Learning, 46:2, pp. 327-369.