The obvious answer is teacher correction. But is teacher-correction effective? There is some research that shows students do not make effective use of teacher-corrections.
Every English writing teacher would like to imagine that their student takes his corrected paper home, pulls out a dictionary and grammar book and carefully goes over each correction. Unfortunately, most students only check to see how much "red" is on the paper and then file it away - never to be looked at again.
Most of the teacher's careful written corrections are actually wasted.
Error correcting takes lots of teacher time and energy and many students just
don't want to see their composition after teacher corrections.
Beware of the student who forgot the homework and just before the homework is due dashes off a quick paper. He makes a lot of mistakes all made in haste. The problem is that the student wants his paper to be corrected and it takes four times the effort to read his mess with multiple errors and correct it. Your policy should be: if the student doesn't have time to try to write it well, then you don't have time to try to correct it.
John Truscott and later Krashen have presented research indicating that grammar correction doesn't really help students at all.
Personally, I've seen that my students do learn from some corrections.
Except for typos and simple errors, self-correction is very difficult for English students because if they knew what was wrong they wouldn't have written it in the first place.
One to One peer correction isn't fun and it is difficult for many students to fully trust their partner's experience or ability.
How can the student add to his English writing skills in a way that interacts with his previous English grammar knowledge and vocabulary?
One of many new methods is called Group writing.
Group writing helps students to benefit from several peers, helps students to learn not only from their mistakes but from the mistakes of others and makes economical and efficient use of the students'and the teacher's time.
The writing tasks are everything from writing a paragraph to writing an essay.
Each group can get a different topic to work on or sometimes it can be the same
topic and they compete with the other groups.
You can use the whiteboard, the large paper paper pads on an easel or overhead
projector as long as there is one per group. One student writes while the rest of the team from one to three others offers suggestions and corrections during the writing process.
Group writing gets the students to benefit from group assistance as a peer-learning experience.
With the entire class looking on we examine each finished writing sample and I ask the class to offer corrections. The class really focuses on every group finished writing to see if it is correct or not.
Group writing seems to be an effective method of correcting English writing errors. Immediate feedback is quick within the groups and when corrections are suggested in front of the entire class.
What is your Teaching suggestion?
Teach English Blog URL
http://teachenglishblog.blogspot.com/
