Page 10 - Accents December

Languages Victoria
After this process, which went on for about 4 months, I formulated my final question:
Which forms of feedback are the most effective at assisting students to improve their writing skills in their learning of languages?
The group
The chosen group of students consisted of twelve Year 11 students of Spanish for the Diploma Ab Initio course of International Baccalaureate. Two of these students had engaged in the learning of the language at their previous schools in England for about one year. All other students were complete beginners in Spanish but had done either French, Italian or German in Years 7 to 10 at the school. One of these students had learned French only for one year at her previous school.
The school was an Independent Catholic secondary day school for girls, Years 7 to 12, located in North Sydney.
The trialling of the various strategies
The first strategy (Term 2)
I had decided on focusing the corrections of the students’ written work on a few grammar aspects, namely: adjective agreement, word order, articles before nouns, and verb conjugation.
I provided the students with a text in English for them to translate into Spanish. This was a way of ‘controlling’ the content of the texts I received for checking and to manipulate it to an extent to obtain a number of the errors I knew they typically made. This was only the first text in this stage, and I continued to give students weekly writing prompts for them to complete at home.
The strategy consisted in highlighting all mistakes found but not correcting the ones corresponding to the fist area of focus (adjective agreement). Students were also provided with a booklet containing several copies of a scaffold for error correction (see image) and a one page “error awareness sheet” (see image below) for them to keep track of their common mistakes as well as try to avoid making the same types in the future. An example of this strategy can be seen in the image below.
Page 10 Volume 8 Number 2