Ron,

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

If we leave the term "national 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.

And there is another thing. There has for some time been a belief that 
too much emphasis on errors leads to more errors rather than fewer of 
them--and stilted writing besides. If that's the case, perhaps students 
relaxed a bit when they found I wasn't going drill them about errors. 
If you need a reference about that, try Finlay McQuade, "Examining a 
Grammar Course: The Rationale and the Result." English Journal, Oct. 
1980, pp. 26-30. What McQuade taught was really an editing course, not 
a grammar course. It's not a very scientific study, but it does show 
how overemphasizing errors can have bad results.

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.

I hope this helps.

Bill



On Oct 14, 2007, at 5:04 PM, Ronald Sheen wrote:

> Thanks, Bill, for the background detail.
>
> Your one comment which needs further discussion perhaps is the 
> following:
>
> 'Errors drop away when students do lots of writing, and
> those that don't drop away can be handled on an individual basis.'
>
> This is not something that I have found though my experience is 
> miniscule compared to yours.   The same argument was made for ESL 
> communicative language teaching.   In other words, providing learners 
> were immersed in substantial doses of conversation, they would 
> naturally correct their errors.  This did not prove to be case.  In 
> fact, what happened was the beginning of the fossilisation of the 
> errors which were not brought to the learners' attention.   The same 
> happens. by the way, with  untutored immigrants   I play chess every 
> day with a 70 year-old Serbian who can express whatever he wishes in 
> English but cannot utter a 'sentence' without errors in it and he's 
> been speaking English for decades.
>
> I would not wish to cast doubt on your assertion as it is clearly 
> based on your long experience; however, I wonder if you have thought 
> about the nature of this process of self-correction that you witnessed 
> - particularly as it goes against what has been reported in much of 
> the relevant literature.
>
> It would be useful if other members of the List were to allow us to 
> benefit from their experiences.   Have they, I wonder, had the same 
> experience of self correction as yours.
>
> Ron.
> To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web 
> interface at:
>     http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html
> and select "Join or leave the list"
>
> Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/
>
>
Bill McCleary
Livonia, NY

To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web interface at:
     http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html
and select "Join or leave the list"

Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/