15.3 Marking and dealing with errors in EL (Sharalee)

The Secondary 3 Express students that I taught didn’t exhibit many glaring errors in spoken EL. During the debates which constituted a significant chunk of their CA2 grades almost all spoken fluently and with confidence.

It therefore came as a bit of a surprise to me that when grading their written work, which I first encountered in the form of argumentative writing, a significant proportion of the class was prone to (in some cases rather serious) errors in run-on sentences, unwieldy expression, and an inability to construct written paragraphs in the basic format of Point, Elaboration, Evidence and Reiteration.

Since the class struggled with the format of argumentative writing, my approach was to break one essay topic into segments (i.e. introduction, counter-point and rebuttal, supporting points, conclusion) and have students tackle each segment one at a time, over a series of lessons. During each lesson, after a short period of explicit teaching and discussion of the structure and content required in each segment, students were allowed to craft their paragraphs in class, and submit these for review. I could then collect them, and assess their writing (which came in small, easy to digest chunks instead of complete essays). Because the writing was short, it allowed me to provide each student with detailed written comments and feedbacks. During the marking process, I found it useful to keep a running list of the errors that the pupils were most prone to making. A pattern almost always emerges after awhile, and I used these to help decide which areas to revisit during the next class.

At the start of the next lesson, students would have their writing returned to them, and time allocated for them to go over the comments and feedback provided, ask questions related to these and clarify any doubts. As a class we would then review the most common areas for improvement by looking at anonymous samples of writing, taken from among the class. This is a useful trick because the students that I taught were fascinated with the opportunity of being given carte blanche to critique and learn from each others’ work. I would refer to samples that exhibited the error we were focusing on (e.g. weak reiteration at the end of a paragraph), as well as model samples taken from exceptionally well-written student work. Each sample could be dissected and discussed as a class, and students were then given time to rewrite their own segment of text, before progressing on to writing the next segment and so on. By breaking the sample written texts into small chunks, the pupils were more likely to be able to spot the errors or good examples that they could emulate.

This approach was viable while on teaching practice, because I had just one class of EL to teach. For full-fledged teachers, the amount of time required for marking might not be as readily available (several classes of bite-sized writing can still lead to enough to choke a teacher). Teachers could instead work on capitalizing on students’ tendencies to pay attention to the work produced by their peers when seeking to correct errors produced in EL writing.