Stephen van Vlack

Sookmyung Women`s University

Graduate School of TESOL

Teaching Writing - Spring 2007

Questions for Scott (1996) Chapter 4: Correcting and Evaluation Foreign Language Writing (Week 5)

1. How important do you think teacher feedback is to student writing?

Feedback is extremely important in writing. Students expect feedback from their writing teachers and if they don't get it they are quite upset and think their teachers are not doing their job. In essence, the most common perception regarding writing teachers, even among writing teachers themselves, is that feedback is the most important thing they can do to help their students. This comes from the simple bottom line fact that in writing it is possible to give feedback. In speaking because it happens so fast it really is quite difficult to get directed feedback, but in writing because everything is there on paper it is possible to give feedback. Following this then, as we shall soon see, feedback has been the main mechanism for teaching writing. The traditional product approach to writing, for example, revolves around students writing and teachers giving feedback. This then opens the entire question of what kind of feedback teachers should give. Feedback can be divided into two basic types, correction and comments. Correction is what we in the foreign language teaching world think of as our general type of feedback, which is simply fixing grammar. Comments, on the other hand, would have more to do with organization, content, and cohesion. It doesn`t seem to much matter how effective our feedback as teachers might be, students and their parents expect us to do it and so we must. Since we are doomed to giving feedback, we might as well try to do it well and for maximum effect.

2. How much and what types of correction from the teacher seems to be most helpful?

In dealing with the issue of correction, which again seems to be the main issue in foreign language writing, teachers need to constantly think about how much correction to give and what type of correction to give. As regards how much, it is probably best to take a very solid middle of the road approach. This approach would include correcting or at least making comment on patterned errors, that is things that would seem to reoccur. In addition to this teachers might also want to focus on errors which cause misunderstanding or tremendously slow the reader down because they create an awkwardness which is very hard to decipher. Turning to the type of correction what studies have shown is that teachers should not overtly correct everything. When the students have to figure out for themselves what the problem is they seem to learn more from it. Teachers are, therefore, encouraged to use something like editing symbols which will help inform the students of the type of error but the students themselves will need to fix that error. In reality there is no perfect formula for types of correction or the amount of correction. In the end it really comes down to your students are and what the purpose of your writing program is. What is important, however, is that teachers consider these things carefully whenever they are engaging in writing practice in their class.

3. How can we best deal with the problem of rater reliability?

In any kind of evaluation/assessment endeavor the biggest problem will always be rater reliability. Many schools avoid having teachers do writing practice and language exams often do not have a writing section because it is believed that assessing writing is too subjective. The basic idea is that anytime you sit down to give feedback or evaluate or do anything with what students have produced you are instantly becoming a rater, whether this is official or not. Certainly teachers owe it to their students to be fair and accurate in their appraisals of their writing. This means to a large extent that they need to be reliable. The best way to insure reliability is to come up with a system of guidelines which the rater/teacher is aware of and follows. Without these guidelines your rating/evaluation is guaranteed to be unreliable. Even with such guidelines ratings are often unreliable and for many different reasons so it is not something that should be taken lightly.

4. What do students want in the form of corrections and how do they react to such feedback in general?

Research has basically shown that most students, in particular students in foreign language writing classrooms, want very specific or what they often call `complete` correction of their writing. Such students don't see the content is being nearly as important as the form and therefore want the teachers to focus almost exclusively on their forms. The bottom line is that students often don't understand comments about content and don't know what to do about it. Form, on the other hand, is usually quite easy to understand and even easier to fix, particularly if the teacher has corrected overtly. We can see from this that it is extremely important to try to integrate the writing process into any type of teaching of writing that we do. It's imperative that students learn about revision and that they can start revising right from the beginning of the writing project. Obviously it is detrimental to try to wait till the very end to start revising or giving feedback.

5. Besides teacher evaluation what other kinds of evaluation are there and how do they work?

In addition to teacher evaluation, which is what most students expect, there are also peer evaluation and self-evaluation. We have already done peer evaluation in class so we should be somewhat familiar with that and the basic idea is at the other students check the work of their classmates. My own experience with peer evaluation in Korea is that it doesn't often work very well simply because students are afraid to say honest things about the writing of their fellow students or they don't feel capable of doing that. It is therefore important to give some sort of peer evaluation sheet to your students so they have guidelines for the evaluation. This is actually no different than what we as teacher should actually do when we go to grade or evaluate the students writing. The evaluation sheet makes it possible for people to be more honest which is what we want to make also learn a lot from depending on how the evaluation sheet is written up. Self-evaluation is when the students grade their own writing. Of course an evaluation sheet is necessary here as well. The biggest problem in self-evaluation is for the students to establish distance from their writing and this has been achieved I find students actually do quite a good job on self-evaluation.

6. How does holistic scoring work and what are some of its most useful and problematic points?

Holistic scoring is when we basely give a very general, overall impression of the writing. Instead of looking at individual points and weighing tem separately, in holistic scoring we simply look at the final end result; that is the actual effect of the writing to determine how well the writing is. To use the analogy that I used in class we can say that holistic evaluation is like looking at painting principally determining whether the painting is good or bad or how good or how bad it might be. Of course we do this by focusing on particular points and in a scoring situation we try to match the sample to a pre-made holistic description. One of the positive aspects of holistic scoring is that it mimics to a large extent what people actually do in the real world. People generally don't try to figure out why a piece of writing is bad they just know that it is bad and that is what we do in the holistic tradition. It is, therefore, quite easy to do it also very fast. The problematic points of the holistic assessment is that is very much subjective with good for one person/rater not necessarily being good for another and since there is really no concrete way of determining how something is good or bad then we can wind up with very different evaluations of the same piece of writing.

7. How do analytic and primary trait scoring differ from holistic scoring?

Analytic and primary trade scoring differ from holistic scoring in that they look at particular features of a piece of writing. In this respect they are both similar but primary trade scoring actually takes the process one step further and uses information from these different particular features to come up with a holistic description of the piece of writing while analytic simply stops with giving scores to particular areas. Following this should be easy to see the primary trade scoring is actually the most useful. And he can we will use our analogy, the same one we used in class. Obviously if we're going to be art critics and we want to determine what is a good painting we need to do this by looking at individual features such as brush strokes and coloring and lines but just knowing how each of these individual features works doesn't really help us too much in assessing the general quality of the painting. What we need to do once we have examined these different areas is to see how they interplay within each other to come up with a holistic type of rating and that is exactly what's done in primary trade scoring.

8. How can T-units be used as a way of scoring writing?

For us in this class we really don not have to worry too, too much about using T-units as a way of scoring writing. I think that in the first language writing classroom and possibly even in the second-language writing classroom T-units can be quite useful in determining how people develop as writers, but I don't think this method is very applicable to us in the foreign language classroom. Our students are using different mechanisms, sometimes including translation, which throws this whole T-unit idea off. More complex sentences only works as a measure of writing prowess when those sentences are grammatically acceptable, comprehensible, and work to make easily read pieces of writing