Thoughts on Responding to Student Writing

1. My Memories of Teacher Responses

                  When I was a student writer, one of the most useful things I found in teacher responses was in the end comments of a paper. Right now, I still remember some of the meaningful end comments my professors made at the end of my paper many years ago and they keep reminding me what I am supposed to do as a good writer. I am not a big fan of grammatical corrections from others on my drafts, especially on prepositional and article usages. Let’s face it: I can correct all grammatical mistakes by myself if there are clear rules defined somewhere on a grammar book. If I cannot correct them myself, they become almost “untreatable” errors to me, unless the instructor is smart enough to come up with a way to teach me how to do self-correction. In my opinion, fixing grammatical errors in all pages is just busy work and does not really show sufficient care from the instructor.

2. Appropriate Feedback for L2 Writers

                  I am also an L2 writer, but I would not prescribe the feedback I received from my instructors to my own students. Content feedback is always useful as long as the students understand what the teacher is commenting. This is constantly a problem because many times students don’t really understand what we have written on the page. How can we expect them to revise based on our comments if they don’t understand our comments? These years, I started to modify my approach to responses and incorporate more oral feedback on my students’ papers. This year, I decide to also try recording my oral feedback to students’ papers by using screencast recording tools (e.g., Screencast-O-Matic). Of course, giving sometime for students to look at teacher’s feedback and answer questions during class time is always useful. Compared to content feedback, form feedback needs to come relatively later unless there is a persistent structural problem that interferes with meaning. I am a big fan of indirect feedback on grammatical issues, and I only comment on grammatical issues within the reach of my students. For example, if the students have never learned about verb phrases in their classes, I would not expect them to produce correct verb phrases in complex sentences.

3. Questions/Concerns Regarding Teacher Responses

                  As all teachers who give written feedback, I am also afraid that my work is being ignored. There are many ways to create opportunities for students to interact with teacher feedback: We can spend a few minutes at the beginning of each class when commented drafts have been returned, and students can use this time to ask individual questions about the feedback they have received. We may also assign revision/editing logs as regular assignments for students to keep track of how they handle their own writing progress via incorporating feedback.
                  As a writing teacher, I need to provide not only marginal feedback but also end comments on my students’ writing. Sometimes, I found myself spend too much time in providing details in the margins but not enough time in giving quality end comments. End comments are something that quite likely accompany the student writers for a long time in their professional developments. This is something I need to continue working on.

















4. Reflections on Peer Reviews:

I have used peer feedback both as a student writer and as a composition instructor. Despite many years of experiences, I still view peer feedback as one of the trickiest things in L2 writing. The following are six common scenarios that I have to deal with peer review as a writing teacher. Can you think of a solution to each one?

1. You asked the students to bring their rough drafts to class for peer review. On the peer review day, you had pre-assigned all the groups, but some students did not bring their drafts. What would you do in this under this situation?
2. During a peer review workshop, an international student got into a verbal fight when another international student in his peer review group regarding a grammar mistake in his paper; he thought he did not make a grammar mistake and the other student was just being arrogant by pointing it out. What would you do under this situation?
3. You decided to adopt a more open-ended approach in a peer review workshop by asking students to write marginal comments on content and organization of their peers’ drafts. The students had learned about the different content elements of the assigned essay as well as typical organization styles through previous class instruction. However, some of them did not write any comments on their peers’ drafts. When you asked them, a typical response was: “The draft looks perfect. I don’t know how to point out any mistakes.” What would you do as a teacher?
4. You have a writing class dominated by Arabic-speaking ESL students, with only a few students coming from other L1 backgrounds. When you assigned peer review groups or had the students form their own groups, it’s unavoidable that you always had groups with the majority of students sharing the same L1. You noticed that although the majority of your students communicated in English in their peer review discussions, there were always a couple of students speaking in Arabic throughout the activity. What would you do as a teacher? 
5. You had both NES and NNES students in your writing class. After a mixed group peer review workshop, one of your NES writer complained to you that there were too many grammar errors in her NNES partner’s essay and that she spent the majority of her time fixing these errors. What would you do as a teacher?
6. You had both NES and NNES students in your writing class. After a mixed group peer review workshop, one of your NNES student told you that he did not feel comfortable commenting on his NES peer’s draft because he thought NESs have more knowledge about English writing. What would you do as a teacher?