The first marking I did for EL was on expository essay. The marking process that my CT shared with me was to underline the words and write the error type above it, like Sp, SS, WW etc. To make marking easier and faster, we did not have to write the correct words. Instead, teachers would have a feedback session with the class by showing a few extracts of students’ work and pinpoint the common errors, especially tense mistakes where students should link tense to situation. The end of the feedback session would be a fifteen minutes time slot where students can ask teachers for further clarification.
The marking time was shortened but I did not feel that the students have learned from their mistakes during the feedback session. They would do corrections for mistakes that they know how to correct, but did not attempt to ask teachers for those that they did not know how to correct.
Therefore, when I did marking for the second essay, I wrote all the correct words so that they would know the correct tense, sentence structure etc. In addition, I wrote as many comments as possible for students to know their strengths and weaknesses in content and grammar. I conducted a feedback session, but this time round, I showed extracts of well-written essays to let students know essays of higher bands look like.
I felt that although correcting all the mistakes for the students is time-consuming (average 30 minutes), the students learnt a great deal. They started to look at what I corrected and asked why I wrote those, under what circumstances should they do the same, how to expand vocabulary and so on. The students lose motivation in questioning when they see only SS, WW, T etc on their work. Through giving them the right words, they would then be motivated to look for mistakes.
In their third essay, there was a marked improvement in the language component, with less errors in tense and sentence structure. I was particularly happy when I marked an essay from one of my Chinese foreign students. I had a deep impression of her because in her previous essays, there would be mistakes in every line, marking her essay probably took an hour. However in this third essay, there were only a few mistakes in each paragraph.
I think perhaps the start of marking and correcting essays for students would be agonizing in the beginning, but subsequently, as students learn from the mistakes, it would become easier for teachers to mark. Therefore, instead of just indicating the type of error in the essay, I would write down the correction for their mistakes. I believe this is a more effective way of letting students learn from their mistakes.
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Hi Hui Min,
ReplyDeleteDuring TP, I observed another teacher using the method below. I found it very clear and useful to help students understand where they went wrong and believe that it will further reduce the occurrence of common mistakes that students commit. Hope it helps during correction of students' errors as well (tedious and inevitable but I definitely agree with you that it's necessary).
What the teacher did was to compile various sentences with errors in them and then organise them into a table. The sentences were also arranged according to the types of errors made, such as errors in grammar, punctuation or expression. After that, she included a blank column beside these erroneous sentences and then printed these out as worksheets for the students. Thereafter, a lesson similar to yours was conducted, where she got students to discuss or work in pairs to identify the errors in the sentences before explaining the answers to them. In this way, students were responsible for identifying and writing down the corrections on their own rather than depending on the teachers to identify it for them. Furthermore, they will now understand where they went wrong and thus retain the knowledge for a longer time (hopefully).
However, there’s always a risk that this technique results in zero response depending on students’ ability levels. Hence, use with care =)
Kian Tiong