A version of this report appeared in LIPS (Language Institute People Speak), an in-house publication at City Polytechnic of Hong Kong. (in 1994)
Since most of us habitually spend hours dealing with our students' compositions, and I for one often wonder to what extent that precious time is being wasted, I decided to try and get some more than anecdotal feedback on various correcting strategies.
Rather than eliciting spoken comments, I asked a small first-year class at City Polytechnic which had recently had a mid-semester composition-in-class returned to it to take out that composition a week later, look at my corrections and comments, and highlight any they had found useful. I hoped, incidentally, that this "second look" would prove a useful activity for them in itself.
Table 1, below, gives a breakdown of the types of "correction" they found useful.
| Table 1. Number of students who deemed a particular type of correction useful | |
|---|---|
| Verb error corrected | 5 |
| Explanation | 5 |
| Vocabulary error corrected | 4 |
| Morphological error corrected | 3 |
| Style adjusted | 2 |
| Ticks | 2 |
| Comment in margin | 1 |
| Final comment | 0 |
| Mistake indicated but not corrected | 0 |
| Final mark | 0 |
The most striking result was that comparatively few of the corrections, fewer than 10%, were considered useful. Mistakes had to be corrected for my intervention to have a chance of being considered useful: challenging the students to think by indicating a mistake but not offering a correction was not seen as useful. My attempts to encourage students by ticking "good bits" was rarely seen as useful; and the attempt to encourage them in finally comments appeared to have made no impact.
I did not analyse the scripts in sufficient detail to turn the raw scores into percentages, which would have been even more useful for comparative purposes, but a glance was enough to suggest that the most appreciated strategy was to offer an explanation as well as a correction.
I do not wish to read too much into these results. Apart from the inherent statistical unreliability of such a small sample, they beg the question of whether what students perceive as being useful is what actually helps them most. Nevertheless, in the future, I think I shall spend a bit more time writing cryptic explanations, and less time searching for something positive and helpful to say at the end.
Please send any comments by e-mail to the author.