"Students have no reason to pay attention to feedback on final drafts; they may not be developmentally (cognitively, linguistically) ready for the kinds of responses they receive from teachers; they may not understand teachers' comments clearly enough to be able to take action on them..." (Casanave 87). When I first stumbled across this quotation during my readings, I immediately underlined it to make sure that I could go back to it for reference again. I have little practice grading the writing specifically of ESL students, but I have done my fair share of grading writing in general. In one instance, I had assigned creative short stories to freshmen. Some were as long as fifteen pages... an assigning mistake that I will never make again, to be sure. I remember sitting down to grade all of these papers, reading through each one, and writing down various comments as I saw fit. When the students got the papers back, they immediately flipped to the back page, the one containing the only thing they truly cared about written there: their grade. As I sat and watched this take place, I wondered if it would have mattered at all if I had written no comments at all on their papers. Do students actually use what teachers write on their papers to help them improve in future writing?
The example that I put forth relates to the final draft of the paper, but the same question could be asked about various drafts, as well. Based on the experience that I have had grading/editing/critiquing papers, I find the "error correction" debate in the writing of L2 writers extremely interesting as it truly transcends the L2 arena and moves into that of L1, as well. Ferris asserts that "error treatment is necessary for L2 writers," and, despite what happened with my comments from the short stories that I assigned, I am definitely in partial agreement with her (Casanave 89). During my own time spent in Spanish classes learning the language, my teacher would correct many of the errors on my papers, and I greatly appreciated her for this. Why would I want to continue to make the same mistake if one could tell me what I was doing wrong and help me correct it right then and there? Simply waiting to see if the students have learned enough and the "error" self-corrects itself is a chance that I would not have wanted to take with my own writing.
I do understand that correcting all of the "errors" on a student's page can be overwhelming for a student. Thus, I believe that teachers should focus on only two or three "bigger" "errors" in each student's paper. Our readings do point out that this may discourage students, and I completely understand just how this could happen. But we as teachers cannot not grade a test because a student may have got too many answers wrong; I'm sure that this could discourage them just as much. Instead, I believe that the marking of these errors should, when time allows, be paired with individual writing conferences so that the teacher can talk over these errors with the student, pointing out what they have done well in the process.
Ferris mentions the ethical dilemma that teachers face in whether or not to correct the students' grammar. Despite the fact that most students failed to look at my comments/corrections on their short stories, I would write the same amount that I wrote before in a heart beat. As a teacher, I would feel bad if I didn't make necessary comments to the students about particular parts of their papers. Sure, maybe they will eventually learn that information/skill as they become more fluent in a language/more skilled in writing, but isn't it our job as teachers to help student writers improve while they are in the four walls of our classrooms?
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