Introduction
In my first year at the Janus Pannonius University I was required to attend a writing course, which was called Writing and Research Skills. During this course the students were required to write several essays, and these essays were collected in a booklet, which was called Portfolio. Besides writing the essays, they had to read William Zinsser’s works, and each other’s essays as well. The last task of the course to fulfill is writing a Research Paper. The students were given several topics from which they could choose.
I’ve chosen to survey feedback types, because I’ve always wanted to know if there was a difference between the feedback of a native speaker of English and of a Hungarian speaker of English. I thought it would be interesting to find out whether there is a difference. I expect to find some, because in the past I got different kinds of feedback from different teachers. Sometimes it was long with lots of details, then it was short, clear, and easy to understand. During this recent task, I tried to look for something specific, something realistic. The answer I’m looking for is: Is there a difference between the feedback of a native American English teacher and a non-native teacher of English. I don’t yet know, but hopefully by the end I’ll manage to find it out.
Method
Firstly, I read Peter Grundy and Vivian Li’s work on different kinds of feedback. After that I interviewed two teachers at the school. One of the teachers was a native American (NS), and the other one was a Hungarian teacher of English language (NNS). I wrote a questionnaire that included eight questions, and I asked the teachers to answer them. After having the answers I analyzed them, and I tried to come up with a solution. In my questionnaire I asked the teachers about their ways of giving feedback to the students. I asked them about on the evaluation of students, about the marks they gave, about the time and timing of returning the papers, and the encouragement in the feedback. The eight questions were easy to answer, so it didn’t take up lots of time to fill my questionnaire. The two teachers could answer them immediately, I didn’t have to wait for the answers. I thought that those questions would help me to find the answer for my main research question: Whether there is a difference between the feedback of a NS teacher and a NNS teacher, and if there is then what is it?
Results
1. How do you evaluate your students’ writing?
To my first question I got almost the same answer. Both the NS teacher and the NNS told me that they made the corrections on the paper. The difference was that the NS teacher said that she corrected the mistakes and it counted in the evaluation, whereas the NNS teacher said that she looked for mistakes in the content, and that counted more. She corrected the grammatical mistakes, but in the evaluation it was not that important.
2. What marks do you give?
To my second question the answer again was almost the same, although there was a slight difference. They gave the same marks (1-5), but only because this is the standard in Hungary. If they had had a choice the NS teacher would have given different marks. She said that she preferred the method they used in America (1-10), but she is required to evaluate the students the same way as the other teachers at the university.
3. How long does it take to correct the works?
There was a big difference between the answers to my third question. For the NS teacher it takes only 15 minutes to correct a paper, whereas for the NNS teacher the same task takes an hour.
4. Do you keep the date of returning the papers?
To the next question I got the same answer. They both try to keep the date of returning a paper. They both try to correct the written assignments for the next lesson. The NS teacher has a different method. She makes the students read the texts aloud, and corrects it immediately. Then she takes them home to check it once more.
5. This semester, during one course, how many written assignments did you give?
To this question I got almost the same answers. The only difference was between the timing. The NS teacher gives written assignments during the course, while the NNS teacher gives two assignments at the end of the course, as a final task to complete.
6. Why did you give two written assignments?
The reasons that the teachers gave me were different for this question. The NNS teacher said that the reason for having the students write more than once during a course was that this method seemed to be more useful both for the students and the teacher as well. The NS teacher simply had had this method for years, and she wanted to stick with it. She said that it had worked in the past.
7. How do you encourage your students in your evaluation?
The NS teacher said that she made comments on the paper, and tried to emphasize the best features in the written assignments. The NNS teacher also made comments on the paper, and tried to encourage the students in those comments.
8. Is there a difference in the evaluation of a student when he/she writes his/her first written assignment or when you already know the person?
The answer of the NS teacher to this question was that in her evaluation she considered the improvement of the student as well as the participation during the class. So it was important for her to know the student to be able to give proper evaluation. The other teacher gives the assignments at the end of the course, so by that time she knows the students’ skills.
Conclusion
When I got these answers I tried to look for the differences between the NS and the NNS teachers. Although I found quite a few, but those differences weren’t that significant as I expected. The methods of the two teachers’ differed, but only slightly, and there should be other surveys to determine whether these differences come from the nationality of the two teachers. The differences may come from the fact that they are two different persons, with different ideas. I think the same result may come up if I observed two native speaker teachers, or two Hungarian speaking English teachers. Although what I found out was that the NS teacher wasn’t that strong on the students as the Hungarian teacher, and we could get an answer for this if we did another research on that.
This task made me think of other possibilities on researching this subject. Maybe my next paper will be about the reason why those two teachers had different methods, and where the methods come from. Although I could not find significant differences between the feedback of these two teachers, I think maybe this could be researched in order to find the reason. I enjoyed doing this task, and I would like to find out more about facts that are related to this task.
Showing posts with label feedback. Show all posts
Showing posts with label feedback. Show all posts
Tuesday, May 8, 2007
W 078 F
Introduction
Students. Studies. Essays. Teachers. Assessment. Each can be different.
Students have various attitude to the corrected essay: Some see only their grades and do not care about the adjustment, while others learn from the corrections. I wanted to find out how English majors at JPU in Pécs relate to their teachers' feedback, whether they found them valuable, something worth looking at, or an absolute waste of time. Thus I did this research in the fall semester of 1998. For this I read an article on the topic from Peter Grundy and Vivian Li and collected information from students
Method
I administered questionnaires to 18 first-year and five second -year JPU English majors. I asked nine questions in Hungarian and the students had to answer in Hungarian as well. Most of them were yes-no types, but they had to value some statements with numbers from one to seven in three questions. I asked them about the sorts of corrected mistakes from which they can learn the best, about how important the teacher's opinion was, how they described a well corrected essay, if talking through the assessment with the teacher was important, how the content and the grammatical mistakes influenced the given mark, whether they cared about the comments at all.
Results and Discussion
Firstly I asked them if they gave their take-home essays to their classmates for reading and telling their opinions about it. Surprisingly, none of the second-year students gave their essays to fellows and only four first -year majors did from the asked 18.
The second question was: Do you read through the corrected mistakes and the teacher's opinion on your essay? Everyone answered yes both parts of the question. My aim with this question was to find out if those teachers are right who claim that it is no worth correcting at all, because learners do not even read through the comments and corrections, they care about only the grade.
Then I was interested in how important the students thought it was that the teacher corrected the grammatical mistakes and the word usage beside the content. They valued it in a one to seven scale: Eight first-year and two second-year students gave the maximum score. And the lowest grade that two first-year and one second-year majors gave was four. (See Table 1)
Table 1: How relevant it is that the teacher correct the grammatical and word usage mistakes besides the content?
As the fourth question I wanted to know whether the students learnt from their mistakes, and I listed the following four sorts of them to find out which type was the best to learn from. Each majors, except one learnt from the corrected mistakes. Most of the first-year undergraduates (15) found the adjusted word usage mistakes the most useful. The corrected grammatical mistakes came out as the second. Eleven of them voted for the rectified spelling and the redressed text outlook as well. From the second-year students each of them marked the corrected spelling mistakes as a type they could learn from. Four of them found important the regulated grammatical, three of them the word usage and only one the amended layout.
I also asked how relevant it was that the teacher marked the type of the mistake (e.g. SP referred to the spelling mistakes). All of the second-year and most (16) of the first-year undergraduates claimed that it was significant.
These English majors reported that teacher's opinion on the returned essay was considerable. "It also helps students to develop editing and rewriting skills, particularly when they need to make substantial changes to the order of their material" (Grundy and Li 11). Only one first-year and one second-year student claimed that it was needless.
My last sizing-up question was: How much do you think, your grammatical mistakes and solecisms influenced the given mark on your essay and how influential the content was?
The second table shows that 12 students gave low grades-between one and four-for the first part of the question about the influence of solecisms and grammatical mistakes and only one major gave the maximum score.
Table 2
From the third table it turns out clearly that most of the undergraduates found the content more influential in the given mark. Sixteen of the asked twenty-three students gave the two highest grades-six and seven-for the second part of the question and only one scored bellow three. When I compared the results of the second and third tables, it revealed that the majors found the mark they got from the teachers related rather on the learnt topic than on writing mistakes.
Table 3.
From the answers to the eighth question it appeared that six first-year undergraduates thought that talking through the corrected essay with the teacher was insignificant. Six from the asked first-year students passed the talking through for important, but the rest (6) of them wrote that it depended on certain things: understanding the corrections or not (for two students), how unfair she thought the mark was(for one student), teacher's personality and sincerity (for two students) and one made it dependent on every of these listed things. Only one second-year major found talking through the assessment not relevant. Three of the five students were positive about its importance, and one would find it valuable, but she wrote: "Igen (fontos, hogy átbeszéljem hibáimata tanárral), illetve fontos lenne, deaz ember sokszor nem meri." (Yes, it is important to talk the mistakes through with the teacher, or it would be important we often do not dare to)
Students listed the characteristics of a well corrected essay in the last point of my questionnaire. Most of the majors (8) wrote that all sorts of mistakes (either in the content or in grammar and in stylistics) should be amended, furthermore, the teacher's opinion should appear on a well redressed essay.
Seven of the asked undergraduates signed the clear correction as one of the main features of the valuable assessment. Five found it notable that the teacher explained the redressed mistakes.
Four students listed the objective correction, three the actual marking as important aspects of a well corrected essay.
Twelve of the students referred that they lacked the positive feedback. Three of them added that a well rectified essay was on which the good parts were indicated too so they could use them in further essays. Five claimed that on a good assessment there must be positive comments as well to get encouragement from. Four undergraduates remarked that a good teacher should value the student's present performance in the assessment considering his or her previous accomplishment.
One of the asked students wrote that an essay is well corrected when the teacher-student relationship does not influence the given mark.
Conclusion
Feedback is important. Students can learn from it, and they consider the teacher's comments valuable. No matter that some teachers found it as a waste of time: "As teachers,... we know that the considerable amount of time we spend on correction is not productively employed" (Grundy and Li 8).
I learned it is. Most students learnt from the redressed mistakes and found the teacher's opinion on the essay relevant. Most of them claimed that it was important that the mistakes of language were corrected and marked too.
For me it was useful to do this research. In the future I hope I can use these results in practice, while I am planning to be a teacher also. I learnt what sorts of corrected mistakes students can learn from and how important the personal opinion and encouragement is for them. I hope others can also find something valuable in this little research, as well as I could.
I think it is a field with huge amount of further research opportunities. I think there should be more research on what kind of corrections students can learn from the best and what are the most effective assessment types. Learning from feedback can be a part of language learning.
Students. Studies. Essays. Teachers. Assessment. Each can be different.
Students have various attitude to the corrected essay: Some see only their grades and do not care about the adjustment, while others learn from the corrections. I wanted to find out how English majors at JPU in Pécs relate to their teachers' feedback, whether they found them valuable, something worth looking at, or an absolute waste of time. Thus I did this research in the fall semester of 1998. For this I read an article on the topic from Peter Grundy and Vivian Li and collected information from students
Method
I administered questionnaires to 18 first-year and five second -year JPU English majors. I asked nine questions in Hungarian and the students had to answer in Hungarian as well. Most of them were yes-no types, but they had to value some statements with numbers from one to seven in three questions. I asked them about the sorts of corrected mistakes from which they can learn the best, about how important the teacher's opinion was, how they described a well corrected essay, if talking through the assessment with the teacher was important, how the content and the grammatical mistakes influenced the given mark, whether they cared about the comments at all.
Results and Discussion
Firstly I asked them if they gave their take-home essays to their classmates for reading and telling their opinions about it. Surprisingly, none of the second-year students gave their essays to fellows and only four first -year majors did from the asked 18.
The second question was: Do you read through the corrected mistakes and the teacher's opinion on your essay? Everyone answered yes both parts of the question. My aim with this question was to find out if those teachers are right who claim that it is no worth correcting at all, because learners do not even read through the comments and corrections, they care about only the grade.
Then I was interested in how important the students thought it was that the teacher corrected the grammatical mistakes and the word usage beside the content. They valued it in a one to seven scale: Eight first-year and two second-year students gave the maximum score. And the lowest grade that two first-year and one second-year majors gave was four. (See Table 1)
Table 1: How relevant it is that the teacher correct the grammatical and word usage mistakes besides the content?
As the fourth question I wanted to know whether the students learnt from their mistakes, and I listed the following four sorts of them to find out which type was the best to learn from. Each majors, except one learnt from the corrected mistakes. Most of the first-year undergraduates (15) found the adjusted word usage mistakes the most useful. The corrected grammatical mistakes came out as the second. Eleven of them voted for the rectified spelling and the redressed text outlook as well. From the second-year students each of them marked the corrected spelling mistakes as a type they could learn from. Four of them found important the regulated grammatical, three of them the word usage and only one the amended layout.
I also asked how relevant it was that the teacher marked the type of the mistake (e.g. SP referred to the spelling mistakes). All of the second-year and most (16) of the first-year undergraduates claimed that it was significant.
These English majors reported that teacher's opinion on the returned essay was considerable. "It also helps students to develop editing and rewriting skills, particularly when they need to make substantial changes to the order of their material" (Grundy and Li 11). Only one first-year and one second-year student claimed that it was needless.
My last sizing-up question was: How much do you think, your grammatical mistakes and solecisms influenced the given mark on your essay and how influential the content was?
The second table shows that 12 students gave low grades-between one and four-for the first part of the question about the influence of solecisms and grammatical mistakes and only one major gave the maximum score.
Table 2
From the third table it turns out clearly that most of the undergraduates found the content more influential in the given mark. Sixteen of the asked twenty-three students gave the two highest grades-six and seven-for the second part of the question and only one scored bellow three. When I compared the results of the second and third tables, it revealed that the majors found the mark they got from the teachers related rather on the learnt topic than on writing mistakes.
Table 3.
From the answers to the eighth question it appeared that six first-year undergraduates thought that talking through the corrected essay with the teacher was insignificant. Six from the asked first-year students passed the talking through for important, but the rest (6) of them wrote that it depended on certain things: understanding the corrections or not (for two students), how unfair she thought the mark was(for one student), teacher's personality and sincerity (for two students) and one made it dependent on every of these listed things. Only one second-year major found talking through the assessment not relevant. Three of the five students were positive about its importance, and one would find it valuable, but she wrote: "Igen (fontos, hogy átbeszéljem hibáimata tanárral), illetve fontos lenne, deaz ember sokszor nem meri." (Yes, it is important to talk the mistakes through with the teacher, or it would be important we often do not dare to)
Students listed the characteristics of a well corrected essay in the last point of my questionnaire. Most of the majors (8) wrote that all sorts of mistakes (either in the content or in grammar and in stylistics) should be amended, furthermore, the teacher's opinion should appear on a well redressed essay.
Seven of the asked undergraduates signed the clear correction as one of the main features of the valuable assessment. Five found it notable that the teacher explained the redressed mistakes.
Four students listed the objective correction, three the actual marking as important aspects of a well corrected essay.
Twelve of the students referred that they lacked the positive feedback. Three of them added that a well rectified essay was on which the good parts were indicated too so they could use them in further essays. Five claimed that on a good assessment there must be positive comments as well to get encouragement from. Four undergraduates remarked that a good teacher should value the student's present performance in the assessment considering his or her previous accomplishment.
One of the asked students wrote that an essay is well corrected when the teacher-student relationship does not influence the given mark.
Conclusion
Feedback is important. Students can learn from it, and they consider the teacher's comments valuable. No matter that some teachers found it as a waste of time: "As teachers,... we know that the considerable amount of time we spend on correction is not productively employed" (Grundy and Li 8).
I learned it is. Most students learnt from the redressed mistakes and found the teacher's opinion on the essay relevant. Most of them claimed that it was important that the mistakes of language were corrected and marked too.
For me it was useful to do this research. In the future I hope I can use these results in practice, while I am planning to be a teacher also. I learnt what sorts of corrected mistakes students can learn from and how important the personal opinion and encouragement is for them. I hope others can also find something valuable in this little research, as well as I could.
I think it is a field with huge amount of further research opportunities. I think there should be more research on what kind of corrections students can learn from the best and what are the most effective assessment types. Learning from feedback can be a part of language learning.
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.
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.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)