Doesn't this scare you?
How to correct students’ writings
When my students do a writing task (say a formal/informal letter, an opinion essay or a story) they normally hand me a piece of paper with whatever they’ve written. Correcting this is easy when the students are young learners or beginners and they don’t write much. But what happens when the story or the essay has been written by an intermediate or advanced student? I’ve always found it hard to just correct grammar or vocabulary mistakes without explaining why – and sometimes there’s not enough time to do so in class or even if you do get the chance to give a good explanation, you’re not really sure students will remember after they’ve left the classroom. I’ve also found that I want to leave a (sometimes lengthy) comment at the end of the writing giving general comments and feedback, and also encouraging students to do better in the next writing task. But, I never have enough space to make all this fit. So, I’ve recently started asking students to send me their writings on a Word document by email. Word can be a nuissance but it also has a lovely tool that allows you to make corrections to a text with forever deleting the original. On the toolbar, in the revision section you just have to click on track changes. So, whenever you delete a word or write something else in your student will be able to see the changes you’ve made. You can also add comments on the side explaining why this or that word isn’t suitable or why this or that grammar point is not correct. And of course at the end of the document you have all the space in the world to personalise your feedback to the particular student.
