Tuesday, September 18, 2012

Some notes on responding to errors


Main points:
  1. Be selective in marking errors
    1. Give top priority to the most serious errors; those that affect the comprehensibility of the text
    2. Give high priority to errors that occur frequently
    3. Consider the student's level proficiency, attitude, and goals
    4. Consider marking errors recently covered in class

  1. The most serious errors
    1. The ones that impede global understanding; usually involve more than one clause
    2. Those that do not affect overall comprehensibility are local errors

  1. The frequently occurring errors
    1. If the student has few global errors but multiple local errors, focus on the local errors and the repetitiveness will become a distraction

  1. Consider the student
    1. Consider her or his level of proficiency
      1. If a student is relatively advanced he or she may be able to cover several errors with no problem
    1. Consider the student's attitude
      1. How confident, resistant, or discouraged is the student?
    1. Consider the student's goals
      1. Does the student want to improve their overall writing or just eliminate the errors?

  1. Consider marking errors recently discussed in class
    1. Locate the error
    2. Identify the error with a symbol

  1. Decide when to start marking errors
    1. For earlier drafts, focus on content
    2. Mark and refine sentence level errors on later drafts

  1. Who will identify and mark errors?
    1. Other readers such as peers can be an active part of the editing process
    2. Afterwards, give them ideas and help them understand how they can benefit from the feedback

  1. For grading
    1. Determine whether the errors and primarily global or local
      1. Use this information when determining a grade
    1. Strong content but too many local errors can bring the overall grade down
      1. It's better to assign an overall grade than separate ones for content and structure; students will overlook what they need to work on and fixate on the higher grade
    1. Justify the grade they got with an explanation
    2. Give them positive comments regarding their strong points and improvements

No comments:

Post a Comment