W 003 F

Introduction

The Portfolio Project was a requirement from students participating in the Writing and Research Skills Seminar in JPU in the fall semester in 1998.

Each student handed in a collection of five scripts or more. The tutor marked the booklets and replied in a "Comments on Your Portfolio" letter. The feedback to students included remarks on the continuity of the work and on concrete language as well as on the tutor's favourite in the collection, tips for revising, advice on the use of the "five T tips" that we had discussed during the course and the letters ended with an overall evaluation.

I wanted to find out if the comments were evaluative or communicative and if the reflections served the tools of feedback or simply judged the merits.

My aim was to detect the communicative value of the responses. I planned to see what kind of letters the students received. I intended to check if the letters were partly similar or every student got a different one.

Concordance research is a way to explore the essence of language use in texts. We can investigate the frequency of their occuarances and from that we can conclude further principles of the corpus. I investigated the vocabulary of the comment texts on the Portfolio Projects.

Method

With the help of a computer concordance program I counted the total number of words, the different types and the most frequent words in the comments. I prepared lists according to their frequency.

I was looking for words and phrases that demonstrate what kind of communication went on between the student writer and the teacher reader. I selected "You" and "I" and connecting words and phrases expressing suggestions or feelings of the reader. These were: "I am glad", "I hope", "I liked", "You will" and the negatives and I examined their contexts.

Results and Discussion
The corpus of the 16 texts contained 3991 words altogether, in which 884 were different . (Table 1)

Most of them, 507 exactly, appeared only once and 147 words occurred twice. More than two thirds of the words appeared only once or twice; therefore, the sentences made up from them were individually created according to the students' works and needs.

Five words (the, you, I, and, to) turned up more than a hundred times. These are basic elements of sentence formation but only "you" and "I" have semantic content. .

46 words occured more than ten but less than twenty times. These could have been the words that appeared in every comment, supposing that not many of them were used more than once in the same letter.

How many times? How many words?
More than 100 times 5
51 < X < 100 4
21 < X < 51 22
10 < X < 21 46
9 times 6
8 times 7
7 times 12
6 times 16
5 times 27
4 times 40
3 times 46
Twice 147
Once 507
Total: 885
Table 1: How many times do most words occur?

I prepared the list of the most frequent words. (Table 2)

LIST WORD OCCURS
1 the 189
2 you 174
3 I 128
4 and 119
5 to 112
6 of 93
7 in 92
8 your 86
9 have 67
10 it 50
Table 2: Top frequent words

Some of these words do not reveal the semantic essence. From the list of most repeated words (Table 2) I excluded articles, prepositions, adjunctives and demonstrative pronouns and auxiliaries. These do not add extra information on the content.

Table 3 shows the top frequent content words. These are the words that mean something.

LIST WORD OCCURS
1 You 174
2 I 128
3 your 86
4 More 48
5 Writing 39
6 Me 35
7 One 31
8 See 29
9 Book 26
10 Read 24
Table 3: Top frequent content words

"You" occurring 174 times and "I" appearing 128 times suggests that most of the time "You," meaning the reader, got helpful personal reaction through advice for improvement or by "I" --meaning the teacher-reader-- showing interest. In nine cases "you" and "I" appeared together.
Five times they occurred with "glad" and 8 times with "hope". Both "glad" and "hope" communicate genuine optimistic approach towards the student writer. There was no form of their negatives : "I am not glad" or "I do not hope" and the sentence parts following the expressions did not contain disapproval. I present the following extracts from the portfolio comments to prove my findings:

"I am glad you have attempted to write regularly"
"I am glad you enjoyed writing these."
"I am glad you have been able to pull this off"
"I am glad you have found time to revise and improve."
"I am glad you showed me some of your essays"
"I hope you have enjoyed the opportunity to do this."
"I hope you have found the process useful and inspiring."
"I hope you will agree with me: It was worth it."
"I hope you will enjoy doing that, too."
"I hope you will give your permission."
"I hope you will want to continue to improve"
"I hope you will want to improve in the future"

I found another word that emphasised the positive attitude towards student scripts. "I like" appeared 12 times, so not every student received this phrase, and that means "I like" did not go through a value inflation; the phrase carried the original sense and could be understood literally.
There was only one line indicating that the teacher-reader did not like an essay, and the form to articulate that, was not negation. This assertion emphasises that most of the essays were good, there was only one exception in the collection.

"I like the different color ink in each script:"
"I like the ends of your essay."
"I like the information and the structure. Good job."
"I liked the description of how you got PC"
"I liked the packaging,"
"I liked the personal reflection and narrative"
"I liked the rhythm of your writing,"
"I liked your dedication to writing and revising."
But: "I liked the essays, with one exception."

"You will" appeared eight times and there was only one "you will not". The phrase was an indication for the future that can help the student to perform better in writing.
"Maybe you will allow me"
"maybe in the future you will be able"
"I trust you will enjoy doing that, too."
"you will find that verbs and nouns"
"you will need to work on accuracy more."
"you will not need to do the his/her trick."
"you will show your research results"
"I hope there will be many more people you will want to give your book to."
"you will work more on your themes"

"Writing" was in the top ten of most frequent content words in the remark letters. Writing is the most repeated noun its verb root "write" is the most frequent dynamic verb occurring in the comments. Write occurs 9 times. Include occurs 17 times. It is a dynamic verb, yet I excluded it because every student got in the part where the tutor asked for permission to include an essay in his next book.

However personal the letters were, the comment matter centred around the keyword "writing" occurring 39 times. The comments could serve as a means of communication about writing skills constructively and enabled the tutor to give positive answers in the portfolio scripts when he had thought it could be practical and beneficial to students. (NOTE FOR JOE: Was that grammatical ?)

Conclusion
As shown in the concordance results the students received different individualised comment letters with suggestions, opinions, approvals and in one response disapproval. The similarities of the texts were based on the segment fragments introducing reflection on the same topic.

Grades weigh student's work but grades alone are not able to reveal more. "Tutors aim to help their students perform as best they can." (Horvath 383) Applying grader comments in Writing and Research Courses might be useful in that process because reacting in letters on student scripts gives tutor and student the chance to benefit from the interaction. Helps "I" and "You" the writer and the reader to complete communication as the vocabulary findings of the 16 comments prove.