Carrie Peters wrote: > I am interested in how teachers > are currently dealing with error in students' writing? Is the red pen > highlighting grammatical mistakes/problems still around?- or is there more > of a focus on the text itself, overlooking the errors? Any information on > web sites, references of people who study error, or comments from those > interested in grammar and error would be greatly appreciated! In our small college, we have an English Dept. of seven faculty with two adjunct persons to assist with teaching writing. We take a wide variety of approaches--from one colleague who teaches composition by exposing students to "great ideas" (emphasizing analysis of texts) to some colleagues who teach by a pure process approach that makes use of lots of personal writing. With perhaps one exception--one adjunct who tends to teach a lot of grammar--none of us use red pens for marking papers. All of us emphasize the importance of multiple drafts--with attention in early drafts given to thesis, focus, development, and organization, and in later drafts to editing the language of the piece. As a teacher of basic writing and ESL writing, I am very concerned with the negative effects of intensive error correction on motivation, confidence in writing, and fluent production of written texts. Basic and ESL writers first need to become convinced themselves that they have something important to say and can produce pieces with ideas that will spark engaged and interested responses from readers. Once they begin working on the kinds of pieces that they really care about composing, their attention can be drawn to the 'static' --created by their sentence-level mistakes and errors-- which annoys readers. But FIRST they need to get a sense that they DO have interested readers, that they are writing for a real audience. Then they will realize their particular 'point of need' and have the sufficient motivation to attend to the kinds of errors we point out. Pointing out errors to students who are not attending to them is a big waste of time for the instructor. I hope that you're aware of the distinction between 'errors' and 'mistakes'. Have you read the classic work on this subject by Mina Shaughnessy, _Errors and Expectations_? Another very good book that I refer to often is Marie Wilson Nelson's _At the Point of Need: Teaching Basic and ESL Writers_. Finally, I think that Bates, Lane and Lange propose a very good system for responding to the writings of ESL students in their book _Writing Clearly: Responding to ESL Compositions_, including a very clearly articulated system of options for marking errors--direct vs. indirect, and from least to most salient types of marking. Sorry for the long-windedness. I would be interested in hearing what you finally decide to focus on and what your findings are. Please update us. ********************************************************************** R. Michael Medley VPH 211 Ph: (712) 737-7047 Assistant Professor Northwestern College Department of English Orange City, IA 51041 **********************************************************************