To err is humane by Earl DeMott

Earl DeMott “To Err is Humane”

“To Err is Humane” A Study on Written Corrective Feedback Earl DeMott Old Dominion University June 23, 2013

DeMott: “To Err is Humane”

Introduction The writers that live within writing teachers know fairly well –either intuitively or overtly- the process which led them to their proficiency level as writers, perhaps having a face, a name, a tagphrase that they adhere to in order to ensure “good writing”. For me, ever since elementary school, I dreamt of writing, but it was only during Mrs. Welty class senior English that I tangibly felt its challenge. Draft after draft, I worked my way through a semester to receive the coveted B-, a demarcation for Mrs. Welty between those who earned Snoopy stickers, and those who did not. Ironically, these childish representations signaled the students’ entry into the mature writing world that Mrs. Welty demanded. Years later, as an English teacher myself, one who has taught the research paper to seniors one year to go on to teach English 9 the next, I am amazed at how often I felt while reading a student work that I was in the presence of a surgeon carefully lifted paragraphs from one source, alternating between paraphrasing and direct quote, to then, two pages later, repeat the process with a second source, as if the writers’ thought, analysis, and interaction with the material were disallowed by the process of the mandated need for replication. My own observations led me to believe that student papers, especially ones based in nonfiction, overwhelmingly employed the skill of summation and little else. When did writing ever become a test of the students’ ability to cut and paste? I vowed, therefore, that I would really teach writing to the new freshman class. The hegemony to my pedagogy had roots in the apparition of Mrs. Welty, but also took evaluative shape in the work of the 6 + 1 Traits researchers, as well as the ideas put forth in outcome based education, a methodology popular during my graduation from teacher’s college.

DeMott: “To Err is Humane”

Not influential, however, was the required college composition for teachers course. A perusal of my transcripts reminds me that I did indeed take such a class, but my attempt to recall the material covered is limited to the memory of writing daily essays of various types, and a discussion on the color of ink used in grading papers, the professor promoting the idea of green for good, red for needs improvement. Not to discredit the professor, who I actually had great respect for, but the logical thread of my own education in the field of writing brought me to a reflective state. Something seemed to be missing. Something big and necessary. This maggot remained, ruminated in my mind, and bore the ultimate question: where then did I learn how to teach writing? Even more perplexing for me was the fact that I graduated with three teaching certifications, and had to sit through English methodology, social studies methodology, and theatre methodology. Certainly, since there is a great deal of writing in all of these field, someone must have taught me how to teach writing. The thought burgeoned into an obsession; my mind starting to reluctantly reframe my professional development into the revelation that the pedagogy in composition instruction – at least for the public school teacher - is actually apprentice based. Profound implications stem from this. Apprenticeship connotes skills based, connotes imitation, connotes tutelage, connotes rising in ranks, connotes craftsmanship, connotes mastery and innovative “signature” once mastery is met, connotes a specialization. Yet, since writing in a literacy based society essentially acts as the cornerstone for all disciplines, it cannot work like an apprenticeship. Literacy based society connotes equity based upon full enfranchisement rather than a limited set of specialists, connotes creative individuality over imitation, connotes finding self identity and narrative through the written word over tutelage, connotes inherent “rights” to literacy over hierarchal advancement into it, connotes free form over regulated writing, connotes open

DeMott: “To Err is Humane”

ownership to language in all its form over the keepers of the fire concept, connotes a non-critical “signature” based on ownership over an acutely crafted “signature” based on adherence to predetermined “rules”, ultimately leading to the art of writing, and connotes the abandonment of writing as a specialization. To put it another way, as literacy has become systematically democratized, the traditional limitations that promote creative growth have become diluted in order to promote a more accessible literacy. Accessibility overrides creativity. I had to see if this actually held true in real practice, so, although anecdotal in nature, I informally interviewed my son, a recent graduate from high school. His answers indicated that he “really” learned to write from his AP European history teacher, and not from his English teachers, stating that the directive approach demanded in AP essays worked best for him. He cited a frontloading process that essentially stepped students through sentence by sentence in a particular paragraph. For example, the teacher would teach that the first sentence should have an interesting historical fact, followed by a second sentence that compared that fact with another time in history, and so on. In this course, therefore, order and organization was predetermined. My son’s second example came from his eleventh grade English class, which, also as an AP class, seemed to work on the same model of mandating students to write in a formulated way. A lesson on writing might look like the following: “(Author) shows (diction, syntax, imagery- pick one) through (select exemplifying passage) until the shift in rhetoric in (select exemplifying passage).” On the evaluative end, corrections took shape in written feedback which was discursive in nature, a rubric which combined a numerical value to a written description of the student proficiency, and (if questioned by the student) a possible explanation of the written comments.

DeMott: “To Err is Humane”

In short, the teachers of writing (one a history teacher, one an English teacher) limited their focus on the writing process to a particular analytical skill, actually going as far as avoiding the need to holistically grade student’s work on all the aspects of writing, by essentially giving the student the words or structure to use in important topic or thesis sentences. Secondly, although the teacher employed three evaluative tools, only one is consistent with the concepts of apprenticeship, namely the written corrective feedback. Seemingly the commentary is relational in nature, as opposed to either quantitative (rubric) or clarifying (question from student), because it directly relates to the work at hand. However, how relational is relational if the transformative process within the student (which takes place after the student runs through the comments) is never assessed or revisited? This suggests two important points: the written commentary given by the teacher encourages the students to use transformative thinking on their own process of writing, and, interestingly enough, for all the promotion of process based learning prevalent in today’s literature regarding writing, it is the product, not the process, that is ultimately evaluated, leaving the evaluation of the evaluation of writing in what Shakespeare might call “that unknown country.” This is where I began my search.

Literature Review In Best Practices in Teaching Writing, Dr. Charles Whitaker exemplifies the convoluted entente of “good” writing instruction. Focusing on the teacher being a mature writer, the use of the workshop model where “the amount of time devoted … differs from teacher to teacher”, the writer’s notebook, “often a three-ring binder (which) may contain whatever the teacher and the student think helpful”, and the use of diverse reading material, where reading plays a major role

DeMott: “To Err is Humane”

in the writing classroom, Whitaker calls teachers to “select an approach that will be effective” while designing their lessons. Authenticity, various modalities of response (from written comments to brief before class oral conferencing), and collaborative peer editors all lead to an evaluation where, in Whitakers words, teachers “especially want to encourage students as writers, validating the writer and writing as important – perhaps the most important goal for response.” As shown above, the evaluative nature of the writing process is nowhere near clear cut; it takes on the cognitive process to writing, the proficiency level of the teacher-writer, and the discerning wisdom necessary to selectively correct student-writers. Moreover, the need to respond in meaningful ways to the student writer involves a reading skill set on the part of the student, as well as a common language in the community which is developed throughout the course. The chaotic contradictions of Whitaker signal the need to understand the multiple layers that is writing. Starting with the process itself, the cognitive theory of task-cuing procedure, studied by Stephen Monsell (2003), Arrington, Logan, and Schneider (2007), and later by Steinhauser (2010) essentially produce three major foci that can be useful for the writing practitioner, namely that the brain has a hierarchical order in performing tasks, there is some “switch costs” when moving from one task to the next, leading to increase errors when tasks are switched and, as Monsell points out, although allowance of preparation often diminishes the error rate when task switching, there is a residual cost that cannot be eliminated by preparation, and “substantial residual costs have been reported even when 5 s or more is allowed for preparation.” Arrington, Logan, and Schneider furthered the study on task switch effects and tested the brains encoding process. Steinhauser looked at the strengthening of task-related associations (i.e.

DeMott: “To Err is Humane”

memory) and their trigger. Most applicable was his consideration of the effect of errors. He states that: Recent findings suggest that errors lead to erroneous task strengthening, which, however, can be reversed by immediate error correction (Steinhauser & Hübner, 2006). In three experiments, the present study examined whether this effect is also obtained when task responses and correction responses share the same response categories but are assigned to different hands or different response modalities (manual vs. vocal). Results indicated that only corrections with the same hand but not corrections with the alternative hand or a different response modality can reverse erroneous task strengthening. These results suggest that only the execution of task-related responses triggers task strengthening, whereas the activation of task-related response categories is not sufficient.

In another field of study, that of English as a Second Language teaching, Kathlene BardoviHarlig reviews the concept of interlanguage, defined loosely as the error-ridden hybrid language used by students as they develop their proficiency of a target tongue. By studying the errors made on a larger scale, one can understand a student’s process towards acquisition. This error recognition, however, does not need to emerge externally. Bardovi-Harlig, citing House and Kasper (1981), brings to light the concept of “downgraders,” a phenomenon where the student (despite the lack of proficiency in communication, and perhaps without metacognition) begins using a heuristic of downgrading grammatical structures and/or lexiconical items in the language usage. These include: “politeness markers (please), play-downs (past tense, progressive, modals, negation, interrogative), consultative devices (would you mind), hedges (kind of, sort of, somehow), understaters (a little bit, a second), downtoners (perhaps, possibly), minus committers (I think, I guess, I suppose), forewarnings (anticipatory devises such as, you’re a nice guy, Jim, but…), hesitators (deliberate malformulations used to indicate reluctance to perform the ensuing speech act such as stuttering or repetition), scopestates (I’m afraid that, I’m not happy that), and agent avoiders (passive and impersonal constructions). (Bardovi-Harlig, ….., pp. 690-691).

DeMott: “To Err is Humane”

John Bitchener of AUT University (New Zealand), while also looking at ELL development, reflects upon the effectiveness of correcting the errors made by language learners, at least in the form of written corrective feedback (sometimes referred to as “written CF” or “WCF”). Bitchener noted the work of Manchon (2011,2012), Ashwell (2000), Fathman and Whalley (1990), Ferris (1997), and Ferris and Roberts (2001), who all conceded that L2 writers “using the CF they had received, were able to improve the accuracy of a particular written text,” then quickly pointed out that “revision of a text is not necessarily evidence of learning. Evidence of learning can only be seen when accuracy in one or more new texts is compared with inaccuracy in an earlier text,” as explained by Polio, Fleck, and Leder (1998), and Truscott and Hsu (2008). Bitchener continues to ask the basic question of whether different types of WCF are more effective than others, noting the categories of feedback: direct, indirect and metalinguistic, and assigning usages for each. Direct CF provides learners with a correct version of the erroneous use of form/structure whereas indirect CF indicates where an error has occurred, leaving the learner to work out what the correction should be, and meta linguistic feedback explains and/or exemplifies accurate target-like uses of linguistic forms/structures. Those more in favour of direct CF suggest that it may be more helpful to learners because (1) it reduces any confusion they may experience if they are unable to understand what it is saying, (2) it provides them with information to resolve more complex errors (such as syntactic structure and idiomatic usage), (3) it offers more explicit feedback on hypotheses that are tested by learners, and (4) it is more immediate. Practitioners in the ELL classrooms offer a great deal of writing advice on the issue of WCF. Dan Brown in the TESOL Quarterly indicates the need to decide on an approach in the melee of a debate on the effectiveness of each model. Brown offers some guidelines to do this, noting the need for selecting a level of explicitly of feedback, or “how feedback draws learners’ attention to the location or nature of an error.” This choice will determine the long range skills developed in student writers. For example indirect feedback which “marks the location of an error” without

DeMott: “To Err is Humane”

correcting it, pushes students “to engage in hypothesis testing” (Bitchener, 2008, p. 105), whereas direct feedback offers clarity. Ferris (2006, 2011) argues that the potential for self monitoring is greater with indirect feedback, and the method of WCF which labels errors by type (Ferris, 2006, Ferris and Roberts, 2001) is actually preferred by students “as long as the code does not lead to confusion.” To this end, Rod Ellis in his article “A Typology of Written Corrective Feedback Types” provides concrete and coded examples on how correction looks in all its forms. Digitally, many websites offer codes to use in “correcting” writing. An excellent marking guide comes from the University of Calgary (http://www.ucalgary.ca/UofC/eduweb/grammar/marking/alpha.htm), in that both codes and explanations of the errors, grammatical and/or stylistic, are addressed. Ironically, Wei Li-qui, in the article “To correct or to ignore?” sees the benefit of the error, and cautions of too quick of an eradication of them. Addresses the heart of the debate, Li-qui cites the need for error analysis by teachers, so that they can learn the processes that led to the errors. Tolerance towards errors, though counterintuitive to traditional teaching, supports the idea that “learner’s errors are a natural part of the learning process” and should (according to Murray, 1999) “have a positive and useful role to play – not the least in illuminating some of the blind spots … that can exist in teaching,” especially when categorized as “persistent errors.” How to handle these errors, or even, whether to handle these errors, remains a hot topic of debate. Zhao Hong Han (2004) questions the overall effectiveness of feedback by exploring the concept of linguistic fossilization, or the phenomenon of “the non-progression of learning despite continuous exposure to input, adequate motivation to learn, and sufficient opportunity for practice,” rendering error correction as “beating a dead horse.” Learning, in fact, does continue to take place, but the maturation of the learning suggests a long term memory of what was 8

DeMott: “To Err is Humane”

learned, errors and all. Noting the seminal work by Selinker, Han delineates the broadening of the fossilization concept moving from fossilizable structures (i.e. local fossilization) to “fossilized interlanguage (i.e. global fossilization). The inherent problems that a teacher faces when interlanguage is in fact fossilized would make teaching of writing, therefore, a futile exercise. For practitioners, then, one model of teaching to explore may come from the research of Collins, Holum and Brown (1991) and Berryman (1991). In Cognitive Apprenticeship: Making Thinking Visible, Collins, Holum and Brown argue that the transparency of learning is evident in the one on one education that apprenticeship affords, but remains invisible in the formal school setting. Whilst under the tutelage of a master craftsman tangibility is omnipresent, the “practice of problem solving, reading comprehension, and writing is not at all obvious – it is not necessarily observable to the student,” resulting in “conceptual and problem-solving knowledge acquired in school” remaining “largely inert for many students.” This creates the problematic gap in student’s conceptual knowledge, and therefore the inability to transfer school lessons into practical application. In the field of writing, for example, the article points out that when teachers use exemplar readings to model good writing, students cannot discern the process writers used in producing these texts. Dubbed “knowledge-telling strategies” by Scardamalia and Bereiter (1985), students become stuck on the content instead of the craftsmanship. Collins et. al. promote the looking back at the traditional apprenticeship model and applying the concept to the modern teacher-student interaction. The steps of this model of teaching including “modeling, scaffolding, fading, and coaching” What is paramount in this paradigm, however, is the nonlinear nature of these practices.

The interplay among observation, scaffolding, and increasingly independent practice aids apprentices both in developing self-monitoring and correction skills and in integrating the skills and conceptual knowledge needed to advance toward expertise. Observation plays a 9

DeMott: “To Err is Humane”

surprisingly key role; Lave (1988) hypothesizes that it aids learners in developing a conceptual model of the target task prior to attempting to execute it. Giving students a conceptual model — a picture of the whole — is an important factor in apprenticeship’s success in teaching complex skills without resorting to lengthy practice of isolated subskills, for three related reasons. First, it provides learners with an advanced organizer for their initial attempts to execute a complex skill, thus allowing them to concentrate more of their attention on execution than would otherwise be possible. Second, a conceptual model provides an interpretive structure for making sense of the feedback, hints, and corrections from the master during interactive coaching sessions. Third, it provides an internalized guide for the period when the apprentice is engaged in relatively independent practice. Admitting that the traditional apprenticeship has the possibility for observation, whereas cognitive apprenticeship does not, the authors promote “making the thinking visible”. Through the use of such techniques as protocol analysis a delineation of the cognitive processes to the meta-cognitive awareness in all stakeholders becomes obvious. In three important steps, Collins, et. al. maintain that transference of knowledge is the key goal to obtain. This is done through the identification of the task, the situation of abstract tasks in authentic context, and the variation of diversity of situations (including the articulation of common aspects).

In the field of writing, the authors cite the work of Scardamalia and Bereiter (1985 and 1987) and Hayes and Flowers (1980). A distinction is made between knowledge-telling (where writing novices essentially write down the ideas they have, and simply stop when the ideas run out) and knowledge transforming “which incorporates the linear generation of text but is organized around a more complex structure of goal setting and problem solving.” To encourage students to adopt a more sophisticated writing strategy, Scardamalia and Bereiter have developed a detailed cognitive analysis of the activities of expert writers. This analysis provides the basis for a set of prompts, or [procedural facilitations], that are designed to reduce students’ information-processing burden by allowing them to select from a limited number of diagnostic statements. For example, planning is broken down 10

DeMott: “To Err is Humane”

into five general processes or goals: (a) generating a new idea, (b) improving an idea, (c) elaborating on an idea, (d) identifying goals, and (e) putting ideas into a cohesive whole. For each process, they have developed a number of specific prompts, designed to aid students in their planning, as shown below. These prompts, which are akin to the suggestions made by the teacher in reciprocal teaching, serve to simplify the complex process of elaborating on one’s plans by suggesting specific lines of thinking for students to follow. A set of prompts has been developed for the revision process as well (Scardamalia and Bereiter, 1983, 1985). Positive results of this methodology showed that these practices produced “superior revisions for nearly every student and a tenfold increase in the frequency of idea-level revisions, without any decrease in stylistic revisions.” Berryman approaches cognitive apprenticeship more systematically, debunking learning assumptions that hinder progress, including the ideas the students naturally transfer learning from one situation to the next, that students are empty vessels to be passively filled up, that learning is behavioural in that it operates on stimuli-response model, that context of learning is immaterial. Berryman’s rebuke of such systematic errors moves on to a call for the construction of “effective learning environments,” ones which employ the concept of the teacher as continuously practicing expert, the concept of sequencing which begins with students gaining an overall understanding of the “terrain before attending to details,” and a level of authenticity (called Sociology by Berryman) that gives due credit to the context in which a student will actually engage in the use of a skill. Inexplicably, there is a limited amount of research that comes from the most central agents in the teaching of writing process: the master writer and the apprentice. 11

DeMott: “To Err is Humane”

One needs to look in the writing labs to find such sources, as logic would have it, the good practice of apprenticeship, with modeling, one on one tutelage, and lessons embedded in the work at hand, happen there. Richard Leary writes in “The rhetoric of written response to student drafts” that a new framing needs to exist, where the relationship between teacher and student is dynamic. “We use the “rhetorical triangle” of dynamic relationships among writer, subject, and audience as a heuristic to guide our response style.” Ironically, the hierarchical relationship is dissolved once the idea that a written response is, in fact, a model piece of writing. In other words, the teacher “becomes the writer,” the student writer of the draft “becomes the audience, and the draft itself becomes the subject.” Offering practical advice, one gets the sense that the truly effective written corrective response is one that includes drafts, considers the audience, and promotes writer’s careful selection of word choice, tone, and voice. In short, the response is a piece of writing in the most artistic sense. The art of comment writing, in fact, is explored by Hyland and Hyland (2006). The building of a teacher as a member of the community, and the reduction of the authoritative image of the teacher, can be fostered through the use of such techniques as paired comments (e.g. ideas are great, but the use of jargon confuses a reader not familiar with this topic), hedged comments (use of “modal verbs, imprecise qualifiers”, e.g. “there’s a little bit of sitting on the fence in your thesis”), reader response from the teacher, rather than expert response (e.g. I really liked the way you threaded in your story) and interrogative form which softens up the comment itself (e.g. the conclusion – should it refer to the examples given in the body paragraphs?) Through the use of student interviews, Maria Ornella Treglia challenges Hyland and Hyland in her work “Feedback on Feedback,” suggesting that where mitigation is appreciated by students, there is a general acceptance of direct feedback, especially when navigating areas of the

DeMott: “To Err is Humane”

language that are deemed as “right or wrong”. Ornella Treglia offers a more detailed breaking down of the categories of mitigation, including praise, paired act patterns, criticism/suggestion, praise-criticism-suggestion, lexical hedges, syntactic hedges, personal attribution . Decades earlier, Jim Hahn, as part of the National Writing Project, addressed the concerns of the student-writers through a series of interviews with English 9 students. Regrouping the feedback on feedback, Hahn drew eight conclusions on WCF. First, students only can learn from comments they understand. Second, students can understand a comment without knowing what to do about the issue. Third, student writers have the perception that they are being clear, since, afterall, they know what they were attempting to say. The issue lies in the reader (in this case the teacher) rather than the writer. Fourth, student writing is often unaffected because despite the fact that there is a genuine belief that comments are written to assist students in their development, they lack the strategies to fix the issues. Fifth, students hold the belief that more careful attention to the reading of their work before submitting will assist in their development as writers, but often lack the ability to spot errors. Sixth, students rarely have an opportunity to fix their errors due to the pacing of class. Seventh, some comments help student writing, especially when framed in positive feedback. Eighth, the assigning of grades to a particular writing has an inconclusive effect on the improvement of future writings. All sources essentially draw the same conclusion, essentially that more research needs to be conducted on the art of written comments, and although strategies exist, with many positive results, the influences that touch the traditional modality of responding to students’ written work come from convoluted waters, and where the comments lead is dubious at best.

Practical Applications 13

DeMott: “To Err is Humane”

In constructing lessons that are supported by the research above, I think the most benefit can be gained by the admittance that the teaching of writing has often been a monologue instead of a dialogue. In this light, I would envision the opening up of this dialogue. Using my English 9 class as an example, the writing element was based on the following concepts, some mandated by the district, others based upon practices that I found worked. 1. Use of approved rubric 2. Use of WIP folder 3. Use of Showcase folder 4. Use of Conferencing 5. Individually Focused Attention on writing element 6. Sustained Group Focus on non-negotiables 7. Use of peer editing 8. Use of various forms of writing 9. Use of combined dose of structure and student choice in format 10. Reflective writing on writing 11. Revocation of the rules 12. Final presentation and sharing

Generally, I would deem the writing segment of class as successful, as the majority of student reflective writings actually stated that they could see marked improvement in their ability to write. Some, however, felt stifled by the process, even though they “understood” the intended purpose.

DeMott: “To Err is Humane”

Making use of the interview regarding feedback is essential for the reflective practitioner, but may provide a discomfort. I would utilize the form created by Maria Ornell Treglia (found in Appendix A), but still hold the interviews orally so that it would not feel like a worksheet. The research actually has me asking a number of questions regarding my practice, rather than providing answers. I think this ultimately means that my focus should be on my development as a teacher of writing rather than as a disseminator of what I deem as “good” writing practices. The ideas of developmental (process related) writing should be employed, as well as metacognition and meta-linguistic remarks. Like the apprentice, the idea of seeing the big picture before seeing the detail suggests that a fair amount of directed teaching, albeit in smaller chunks, may be in order. More poignantly, the challenge of an apprentice like classroom is more solidified in my mind, and it tells me that conferencing (although time consuming) should have a major presence in the class. This begets the question of what can be sacrificed as more and more demands are placed on the teacher. I question the effectiveness of the peer editor, the effects of too direct of written corrective feedback , and ultimately the concept of switch cost in cognitive response. The way I envision my writing instruction regarding peer editing is to have “laser focus” on one element of writing, rather than a holistic approach from student editors. Having employed the work of 6+1 Traits to Writing in the past, I feel this is an excellent rubric to use, due to its flexibility. A lesson very well might just concentrate on sentence fluency, ignoring all the inherent organization, detail, grammatical errors. A second lesson might shift to just organization, ignoring the other elements as areas of correction. This strategy should employ the concept of repetition of task and avoid the switch cost of jumping from one area of writing to the next.

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I actually found that when I would just indicate location of the error, rather than the nature of the error, more students came to my desk to ask for clarification. They did so, however, often with a guess of what the mark meant. I have not been able to follow through with research on the overall effectiveness of these indirect marks. I feel a combined use of indirect WCF and a follow up peer editing circles might encourage the engagement of students with their writing. Finally, I would purposefully employ the mitigation techniques suggested by Hyland and Hyland and directly teach peer editors to do the same.

DeMott: “To Err is Humane” Sources Arrington, Catherine M., Gordan D. Logan, Darryl W. Schneider . Separating Cue Encoding From Target Processing in the Explicit Task-Cuing Procedure: Are There “True” Task Switch Effects? , 2007 Bardovi-Harlig, Kathleen. Exploring the Interlanguage of Interlanguage Pragmatics: A Research Agenda for Acquisitional Pragmatics. 1999. Berryman, Sue E. Designing Effective Learning Environments: Cognitive Apprenticeship Model, 1991 Bitchener, John. A reflection on ‘the language learning potential’ of written CF, 2012 Brown, Dan. The Written Corrective Feedback Debate: Next Steps for Classroom Teachers and Practitioners, 2012. Collins, Allan, Ann Holum, and John Seely Brown. Cognitive Apprenticeships: Making Thinking Visible, 1991 Demaree, Dedra. Measuring the Effect of Written Feedback on StudentWriting, 2006. Ellis, Rod. A typology of written corrective feedback types. 2007. Hahn, Jim. Students Reactions to Teachers’ Written Comments, 1981. Han, Zhao Hong. Fossilization: five central issues, 2004. Hyland, Ken and Fiona Hyland. Interpersonal aspects of response: constructing and interpreting teacher written feedback, 2006. Leahy, Richard, The Rhetorical of Written Responses to Student Drafts, 1998. Li-qui, Wei. To correct or to ignore? 2008. (Li-qui 2008) Ornella Treglia, Maria. Feedback on Feedback: Exploring Student Responses to Teachers’ Written Commentary, 2008. Steinhauser, Marco. How to Correct a Task Error: Task-Switch Effects Following Different Types of Error Correction, 2010 Whitaker, Charles. Best Practices in Teaching Writing, 1998.

DeMott: “To Err is Humane”

APPENDIX A (From Maria Ornella Treglia: Feedback on Feedback) Protocol for Interview with Students 1. When your teacher returns your essay, do you read all of the written comments or just some of them? 2. During the process of revision how much do you rely on the teacher’s comments? Do you go back to your teacher and ask her or him to clarify a comment you may not have understood? 3. How do you usually feel after reading your teacher’s comments? Encouraged Same as before Discouraged 4. How do you feel when you finish writing a draft? Are you optimistic about having done a good job or do you usually feel you could have done better? 5. What are some types of comments you find helpful? (Student will point them out in the copies of her or his essays that I bring to the interview.) 6. Now show me in the essays any comments you didn’t find useful and tell me why. 7. Do you prefer that your teacher write a lot of comments, a moderate number, or very few? Explain the reason for your preference. 8. Do you feel you have learned from your teacher’s comments? Could you give me some examples? 9. What is one thing that a teacher can do to help you improve your writing?