As I pointed out in the workshop, first of all, we should ask ourselves: Why do we think our students should write?.Once we get our aim, the next question should be: What kinds of writings do our students usually do as a task? Why is that so?. Now we are ready to answer the following question: How do we correct our students’ writings?
I absolutely believe that giving our students the tools to write successfully is a must. Let’s start by knowing the names and uses of punctuation marks, then let’s give them functional phrases they can work with. Is that it? Not at all. Providing a model text would be very helpful as well as reviewing connectors. And last, but not least important, do share with them the correction rubric. That way, our students will be aware of what must be taken into account when performing the given task. The rubric must comprise a suitable assessment criteria for the level you are teaching.
Expanding sentences inserting extra information is a very useful way to teach students to write. It also helps when you provide a model textin your class to be corrected by everyone. Keep in mind that spotting somebody else’s mistakes is always simpler than spotting our own.
During the workshop at our congress, teachers were really cooperative and came up with interesting proposals; all of them were really valuable. One particular point they made was identifying all the mistakes, even the ones that were not penalized in that particular task. In their opinion, it works as an alarm clock, since students will be aware of them from then on.
WHAT ABOUT YOU?
Do you find these strategies useful?
Have you tried different ones?
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Estimated reading time: 1 minute, 30 seconds
