I especially enjoyed reading chap. 7 in the Ferris book on error correction. I went back and looked up the error chapter in Ellis 1994 (the study of second language acquisition) since it often has well defined terms for me to treat the topic. I noticed that Ellis (pg 51) notes that Corder (1967) defines error as a lack of competence on the target form and mistake as a lack of performance in the target form.
When looking back over the material in Ferris which covers some of the same notion as what an error is but doesn’t distinguish it from a “mistake”. I began to see what made me intuitively keep on the error log. If the student is making an error in performance mainly, ie a mistake, then an error log makes perfect sense and focus on teaching form in a classroom would be essentially wasted since they might have a degree of competence in the form already. However, if they are continually making the error then they should be able to keep a journal to self correct. To be honest, the main problem with textbook examples of errors are the forms they use are often too simplistic or made from sterile content to be enough use to the student. I suspect a log of their own errors in the form would be beneficial in correction.
Although, I do agree that the journal should not be taken on too soon and I really like the idea of focusing on content at first. Although I understand the argument of tackling grammar early on when it confuses the content.
Again, this might be useful for a log of target forms they are making significant mistakes with. I am also a big fan of checklists. I think the error log could be combined with them turning in a checklist of forms they checked for. I would if it would be useful for them to turn in a few examples that they corrected before turning in the revision?
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I also enjoyed Chapter 7 of the reading, and actually tried something they suggest and I think Bobbi had suggested previously - having the student read their work aloud. I am working with a PhD student on revising her dissertation. Previously, I had been reading her working, marking errors or confusing parts, and then conferencing with her on what she meant and how we might change it. The conferencing helped to keep her voice in the paper, but I was still a little concerned that I might be taking over or inserting my own voice at times. Since it's her 300 page dissertation and she is defending soon, I thought that we might not have time to do something like reading the paper aloud. But, I decided to try it this past week anyway.
ReplyDeleteSo, I had her read her dissertation aloud and what I found was that this method really does work. Things that we had discussed before (in other chapters of her dissertation) were present in the writing, and she was able to recognize those things. She might suggest how to fix it, or if she had no clue, I would suggest something, making sure that it was still saying what she had intended to communicate. I think that it might help her self-correct more in the future, which falls in line with our goal of making our students better writers for the next time.