van Vlack

Sookmyung Women`s University

Graduate School of TESOL

Teaching Writing

Fall 2007

Raimes (1983) Chapter 9 - Techniques in Responding to Students Writing

Answers

1. When should a teacher respond to student writing?

As we said in class, the simple answer to this question is always. The bottom line is how a teacher responds to students writing really has a lot to do with how they actually teach writing. Unlike so many other endeavors regarding language, it`s impossible to separate the teaching of writing from the feedback issue. That is why the feedback issue is so important and as so often discussed among writing teachers. So the issue really is not when should a teacher responds student writing but how a teacher should respond to students writing.

For the most part people have always assumed that the teacher responses come at the end of the first draft and much of the research on this has been done with this assumption in mind. This creates a rather skewed and problematic situation for them selves who just want to teach well. Much of the research has shown that written comments simply do not work or have little effect on student writing over the duration. This probably has more to do with how the written comments are given and when then the actual validity of written comments, yet people have interpreted this quite broadly. Many writing teachers have taken this to mean that they do not have to or maybe even should not provide written comments for their students. This is obviously not a good idea. We need to give our students written comments in large part because that`s what they expect. But they can also be effective if done effectively and of course this is all relative. Was effective for one group will not be effective for another group and of course efficacy will also depend as well on the different types of writing that you have in your students do or the specific writing project. So as writing teachers need to keep all these things in mind.

My own personal answer to this question is that teachers should respond to student writing through out the duration of the writing process. It is probably not appropriate to wait until the very end of the writing process to have students get some feedback. At this point it will be impossible to give effective comments of any type. As we mentioned throughout this course when the hard things about writing is trying to balance all the different forces need to be taken into consideration when writing. Based on this very simple idea giving in comments related to a everything in a writing task is going to be a daunting task for both the teacher as well as the student who has the end of reading all this and trying to understand it.

Our goal in given comments to students is to get them to learn how to write better. Ultimately, what we want to make them autonomous writers and we use comments to guide them. Given comments isn`t just about getting them to fix their texts it`s more about getting them to learn how to fix their texts by themselves. We give comments to teach and make them better writers and this needs to be linked to the writing process, pretty much like everything else and for reasons we have discussed many many times in this class.

2. What are the some of the forms a response can take?

Raimes (1983) gives us five basic types all forms that responses can take. We went over the same class and they are covered in brief in the other file which I`ve given you so it is no point in really going over these different things. This is particularly true since we actually modeled each of these different things in class several times. The thing to remember is that we probably want to try to use all these different forms. Which one were going to use at which point in the writing process will really depend on the goals we have set up for our students as well as the students themselves and the project they are working on. If the project is being done in class than we are going to be able to give more spoken comments to students as they`re working on this in class. If they are working on this out of class by themselves we might want to give them checklists for each day that they are working on this and for each point they are working on. All these different things will vary depending on all these variables.

3. What are some of the advantages and disadvantages of peer assessment?

We have modeled peer assessment in the class on several occasions and have already talked in some debt about the vanities and disadvantages of peer assessment. I bring it up here again because I think there is a lot of potential in doing peer assessments not just for the teaching of writing but just for the teaching of English with our students specifically in Korea. As has been previously mentioned, one of the important prerequisites for good peer assessment is to change the relationship between students in the classroom. Not only do we need to make our students more critical and how they analyze their own language in the language of others in the macro and micro way, but we also need to get them to collaborate more and not compete as much. One of the most difficult lessons which students all over the world need to learn in relation to writing is that distance must be established between the writer themselves and their writing. This can be quite hard to do, but is actually necessary in trying to get students to write well. Just because someone produces a bad piece of writing doesn`t necessarily mean that they are stupid or don`t have good ideas for anything else. Attacking a person`s writing is not attacking them. We need to get students to understand this distance both when dealing with others but also in dealing with themselves this is how we can become critical. Being critical is not being personally critical and that`s quite important.

Aside from these bare essentials, the advantages of peer assessment is that we instantly have a four skills activity going on in class. Student need to read and speak and listen as well as write. It can be fun if we create the right environment in the classroom for the students. Writing does not have to be serious it can be interesting and fun. Likewise, nothing produces a greater sense of achievement than creating a good piece of writing. Peer review lets students share the experience.

4. How can we deal with students errors in writing?

As with any kind of error response we have this great dichotomy between implicit and explicit feedback. Studies have been shown which argue strongly in favor of one as opposed to the other and vice versa. I`m not sure this is really the issue so much as the idea that if we go through the writing process carefully we don`t have to worry so much about this. The basic ideas we don`t want students errors to become overwhelming. This often becomes the case when we withhold our response to the very end and then both we as teachers and the students are overwhelmed by the magnitude of possible errors. So our first goal as teachers is to try to create a situation where the amount of errors will not be overwhelming. How we do this it is obviously quite simple. We break the writing process down steps and tried to give guidance and feedback as the students move through those steps. Another interesting it of research is that positive comments seem to have a much greater affect than negative comments. So please, and don`t forget to not only respond to errors but also respond to things the students have done well. Positive reinforcement often has a much longer effect than negative feedback.

Getting back to the crux of the issue of how we deal with errors, the simplest thing is the title at the students figure out their own errors through your guidance and scaffolding. You can do this through checklists as well as through verbal responses. Again which are going to use will depend on at what point in the writing process you’re doing is as well as the level of the students and the type of writing which you are trying to get them to do. Being overly explicit in your feedback does help the students but only when there is some sort of follow up to what they need to do. In short, if you’re going to give a lot of explicit written feedback to the students you need to have them deal with that feedback in a very direct way. They need to use it and analyze it to not only produce better pieces of writing quickly (which they often do without really thinking about the errors at all) but to also learn about both writing and the language itself which they are writing in.

5. Why do we, as teachers, respond to students writing?

This question was certainly partially answered in question one above. As teachers response to students writing because that is what students expect, but also because it is a very effective way of also teaching writing. Writing is best learned by doing but obviously students can do everything by themselves they need guidance and this is what our responses are really about. We use our responses to guide students to better learning through better practice. Learning and practice here are very closely linked. So, we set up writing practice for our students we obviously need to have very specific goals outlined about purpose of the practice and the perceived acceptability of the writing which we’ want our students to produce. Only after we have set this up, the actual practice, can we really decide how we are going to respond to the students writing. Our goal in responding is to get them to learn not just about grammar but also about writing itself. We need to keep this in mind as writing teachers.