Bill,

Here are some comments on yours:


You: My goodness! Three question marks! And a question about a term that I
never used!

Me:  What's wrong with questions?   Aren't they part of what this List is 
about?  As to my creating a term for the process you described, it seemed to 
be accurate in terms of what you wrote previously.  (but see below)

You:  If we leave the term "natural self-correction" aside, you seem to ask
> how it could happen that errors would drop away without any formal 
> teaching of grammar or lessons in correctness.
>
> Well, I can't be sure why it happens. But I did grade papers and I marked 
> errors, like any other English teacher. Maybe students learned from my 
> corrections. And because I had students write a lot of papers, maybe there 
> was more opportunity for such learning. And because, in my marking of 
> papers, I tended to show students how to correct the errors (rather than 
> making them figure out what my marks meant), maybe that would help to 
> overcome the "fossilisation" that you worry about.

Me: This changes the whole situation.  In your first description of the 
process, you did not mention: 'And because, in my marking of papers, I 
tended to show students how to correct the errors (rather than making them 
figure out what my marks meant), maybe that would help to overcome the 
"fossilisation"..   This means that my term, 'natural self-correction'
is incorrect, 'teacher-stimulated self correction' being more accurate.  In 
fact, it changes the impression given by your previous description which, 
rather than being an endorsement of the the non-teaching of grammar, is 
quite the reverse.   It seems to me that you have followed a more 
traditional approach to error correction than what is fashionable to day ie 
help students to discover the reason for errors but don't tell them directly

You:  Finally, there was a time when I used a lot of sentence combining, a
> technique that I believe was invented by ESL instructors. Sentence 
> combining is just about the only technique that has been proved beyond 
> much doubt to work in improving student writing. To my knowledge textbooks 
> of sentence combining went out of print ages ago, but I still used some 
> exercises of my own design in basic writing (aka remedial) courses. These 
> exercises emphasized the rhetoric and organization of the related writing 
> assignment rather than correctness, but maybe they also helped in 
> correctness.

Me:  This is exactly the sort of invaluable teacher experience that needs to 
be subjected to some sort of comparative empirical study.  As it is, it is 
anecdotal and, therefore, loses its power to have an impact on current 
practice.

Thanks again, Bill, for providing such a detailed account of your 
experience.

Ron Sheen 

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