Page 131 - Teaching English as a Foreign Language for Dummies 2009

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Part II: Putting Your Lesson Together
You may not want to highlight every error, as this may leave a piece of writing that reads well overall covered in disconcerting marks.
Many teachers gradually wean their students off the code in stages:
✓ Put a symbol next to the error
✓ Put symbols in the margin only for each line ✓ Give an overall assessment without symbols
The advantage of doing this is that the students gradually become more inde- pendent and aware of the need to edit their own work. During this process the teacher presents several compositions by other students so that the whole class can practise editing together.
If your students are comfortable with it, you can encourage peer correction of written work too.
Choosing written errors to work with
As it isn’t usually motivating to correct everything in an extended piece of writing, you need to give some thought to which points are worth dealing with and which aren’t.
Written work includes several areas that may need correction. These include:
✓ Style. This covers the right degree of formality and the presentation of the work.
✓ Grammar.
✓ Vocabulary.
✓ Cohesion. There needs to be a linking of ideas with appropriate words such as because, therefore and after that.
✓ Task completion. Consider whether the piece of writing has really ful- filled the task that you set.At the top of the list of mistakes to correct, many teachers put style. Whenever students write they should have a reader in mind and reflect this in the degree of formality and the presen- tation. Take the two pieces of writing in Figure 7-1 for example.