Teaching Writing - Week 13 - Teacher Response to Student Writing

Introduction: Hello and welcome to Week 13 of the course Teaching Writing for the Bachelor's in English Teaching at ULACIT in term IIC 2023. Today we will look at the important topic of providing students with feedback and error correction and we will discuss some challenges and strategies associated with responding to stduents' work. We will also take time to review your pre-writing creation and discuss the instructions for your ninth and final creation of a Peer Feedback / Self-Editing protocol.

Today's Goals:

• Demonstrate the design features of your pre-writing activity creation.
• Consider issues and strategies in responding to students' writing.
• Review a number of design options for self/peer editing protocols.

Guiding Questions:

• How can you helps students generate and organize their ideas?
• How can you provide effective responses to students' writing?
• How can you support peer feedback and self-editing?

Task 1: Creation Demo- Pre-Writing Activity

This week you were asked to design your eigth activity creation. Let's take a moment to review what you created.

• Example: Walk us through your plan.
• Strengths: Tell us what you think are the strengths of using pre-writing activities to generate and organize ideas.
• Challenges: Tell us the potnetial challenges associated with pre-writing tasks.

• Additional Considerations: CLICK HERE

Task 2: Responding to Students' Writing

Let's take some time to explore the topic of providing correction and feedback on students' texts.

• Starting Points: Consider this quote and then discuss the questions below. "The ways we react to students’ work will depend not only on the kind of task the students are given, but also on what we want to achieve at any one point. There are a number of ways of reacting … but these generally fall within one of two broad categories: responding or correcting (Harmer, p. 108).”

• What is the difference between responding and correcting?
• What kind of feedback did you receive more often as a student?
• What are the benefits and drawbacks of focusing exclusively on correcting?

• Teacher Roles: When giving feedback on students' writing the teacher can take on a number of roles which can fall on a spectrum between the two extremes of Examiner and Audience. What order would you put the other roles in? (Assistant, Resource, Evaluator, Editor, etc.)

• Audience: Read, appreciate, and respond to their ideas.
• ...
• ...
• ...
• ...
• Examiner: Make an objective evaluation of performance.

• Raising Awareness: We give feedback to help students. become aware of the aspects of their writing they are performing well and ones where they need to improve. However, if our feedback is to be effective, students need to actually pay attention to it and understand it. Consider this quote.

•  "When teachers return corrected work to their students, they should ensure that the students do not immediately put it to one side, with only a cursory glance at the grade and some of the mistakes. Good correction methods include ensuring that the students understand what the mistakes are and how they can be corrected – if possible, there and then (Harmer, pg. 110).”

• Correction Techniques: The author gave a variety of correction strategies and you were asked to describe two of them and your thoughts. 

• Selective Correction
• Using Marking Scales
• Using Correction Symbols
• Reformulation
• Referring Students to a Dictionary or Grammar Book
• Ask me
• Remedial Teaching

• Response Techniques: Of course, feedback goes beyond simple error correction. The author shared three strategies:

• Future Statements: Have students write explicit comments based on teacher feedback and students' experiences in the drafting process about how they can improve on their writing assignment. What are your thoughts about the purpose and potential benefit of this task?

• Taped Comments: What options do we have in 2023 to facilitate this mode of feedback?

• Responding to Virtual Texts: What unique opportunities do we have to respond to students in virtual texts compared to paper and pencil?

• Peer Review and Self-Editing: We know that teachers are not the only source of potential feedback. How can we include opportunities for peer review and self-editing in meaningful ways? Let's consider this in a bit more detail. 

• More Options to Consider: CLICK HERE

• Hands-On Task: Let's take a look at a sample student writing text and practice how we might provide him with effective feedback. 

• Responding and Correcting: CLICK HERE

Task 3: Creation 9 - Peer Feedback / Self-Assessment Protocol

Let's finish today's class by previewing your next creation. 

• Assignment Guidelines: CLICK HERE

References:

Harmer, J. (2004). How to Teach Writing. Longman.

Hyland, K. (2003). Second Language Writing. Cambridge University Press.

Nation, I.S.P. (2009). Teaching ESL/EFL Reading and Writing. Routledge.