Text 5

What should feedback be mainly on: language? content? organization?

The problem

When a student submits a piece of original writing, the most important thing about it is arguably its content: whether the ideas or events that are written about are significant and interesting. Then there is the organization and presentation: whether the ideas are arranged in a way that is easy to follow and pleasing to read. Finally, there is the question of language forms: whether the grammar, vocabulary, spelling and punctuation is of an acceptable standard of accuracy.

Many teachers are aware that content and organization are important, but find themselves relating mainly to language forms in their feedback, conveying the implicit message that these are what matters. This is for various reasons:

1. Mistakes in spelling or grammar catch the eye and seem to demand to be corrected; they are very difficult to ignore.

2. Students also want their language mistakes to be corrected. (Ask them! And see Leki, 1991.)

3. Language mistakes are far more easily and quickly diagnosed and corrected than ones of content and organization. 

Advice

We should, I think, correct language mistakes; our problem is how to do so without conveying the message that these are the only, or main, basis for evaluation of a piece of writing. One possibility is to note corrections within the body of the text, and devote comments at the end to matters of content and organization, followed by the evaluation. Alternatively, we may correct mistakes and make suggestions as to content and organization, but not evaluate; and give the evaluation only on the basis of the rewritten, polished version.

UR, Penny. A Course in Language Teaching - Practice and Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009, p.170.

Text 4 

Help students to learn vocabulary in context

The best internalization of vocabulary comes from encounters (comprehension or production) with words within the context of surrounding discourse. Data from linguistic corpora can provide real-world actual language that has been printed or spoken. Rather than isolating words and/or focusing on dictionary definitions, learners can benefit from attending to vocabulary within a communicative framework in which items appear. Students will then associate new words with a meaningful context to which they apply. For example, for a beginning level of students, pictures, realia, and gestures can be used to describe meaning in context. For a more advanced level of students, encourage them to consult online corpora (e.g., the British National Corpus, or the Corpus of Contemporary American English: COCA) to gain knowledge of patterned sequences, particularly collocations or words that go together (Liu & Jiang, 2009).

Encourage students to develop word-learning strategies

Included in the discussion of teaching reading were such strategies as guessing vocabulary in context. A number of clues are available to learners to develop word-attack strategies.

Considering that only a small fraction of the word list can be covered inside the classroom, it is necessary for students to develop effective strategies for learning vocabulary on their own. Word-learning strategies refer to “the planned approaches that a word-learner takes as an agent of his or her own word learning” (Zimmerman, 2014, p. 297). Once they encounter unknown words, they can try to figure out how the words are used by asking questions such as:

• Is the word countable or uncountable?

• Is there a particular preposition that follows it?

• Is it a formal word?

• Does it have positive or negative connotations? (Zimmerman, 2014, p. 298) 

An effective way to encourage word-learning is to urge students to use vocabulary notebooks to enter new words, and to review them daily, once they identify their learning goals. Studies show that in order to understand television shows learners need to know about 3,000 word families and have knowledge of proper nouns (Web & Rodgers, 2009). If they wish to read novels and newspapers comfortably, they need to have a vocabulary size of 8,000–9,000 word families (Nation, 2006). The fact that increasing vocabulary size will influence the degree to which they can understand and use language may motivate them to be determined to expand their vocabulary notebooks.

Unfortunately, professional pendulums have a disturbing way of swinging too far one way or the other, and sometimes the only way we can get enough perspective to see these overly long arcs is through hindsight. Hindsight has now taught us that there was some overreaction to the almost exclusive attention that grammar and vocabulary received in the first two-thirds of the twentieth century. So-called “natural” approaches in which grammar was considered damaging were equally overreactive. Advocating the “absorption” of grammar and vocabulary with no overt attention whatsoever to language forms went too far. We now seem to have a healthy respect for the place of form-focused instruction — attention to those basic “bits and pieces” of a language — in an interactive curriculum. And now we can pursue the business of finding better and better techniques for getting these bits and pieces into the communicative repertoires of our learners.

BROWN, H. D.; LEE, H.. Teaching by Principles: An Interactive Approach to Language Pedagogy. Fourth Edition. New York: Longman. 2015.