WRiting Across the curriculum

Responding to Error in ESL Writing

by Rachel Dodge, WAC Fellow

 

An important aspect of teaching ESL writers is being aware of the eminent presence of error in their writing.  It is inescapable and quite understandable to have errors in one's writing when composing in a second language.  When responding to an ESL (English as a Second Language) student's, or any student's, paper, it is helpful to have different strategies for responding to errors found in their writing.  The following is based on CSUS Professor Dana Ferris' book, Treatment of Error,[1] as well as my own experience tutoring ESL students, and is meant to explain different types of error and error response:

 

Direct/Indirect Feedback

Direct feedback is when the teacher/tutor provides students with explicit written corrections in response to error.  "If students are revising or rewriting their papers after receiving teacher feedback, they are expected merely to transcribe the teachers' suggested corrections into their texts." (Ferris 19).  Indirect feedback is when the teacher/tutor alerts students to error using general comments, but gives students the opportunity to fix errors themselves.  The advantages of indirect feedback are as follows:

• Studies show that indirect feedback "is more helpful to student writers in most cases because it leads to greater cognitive engagement, reflection, and 'guided learning and problem-solving'" (19).
  
 
• Although error is greatly reduced from one draft to the next as students respond to direct feedback, student writing as a whole improves over time as a result of indirect feedback when students are asked to find errors, and solutions to errors, on their own.

Global/Local Errors

Global errors refer to "errors that interfere with the comprehensibility of a text" (22).  These are errors concerning overall content, ideas, and organization of the writer's argument.  Local errors refer to minor errors such as grammar, spelling, or punctuation "that do not impede understanding" of a text (22).  Following are suggestions for responding to global and local errors in student papers:

• When responding to a writer's paper, a good rule of thumb is to focus on global concerns prior to, or more than, local concerns, especially when responding to a first draft.
  

• Try responding only, or at least mainly, to global errors in first drafts and discuss local errors closer to the final due date for essays.  This makes sense since entire sentences containing local errors in a first draft may not even exist anymore in a more finalized draft.

Treatable/Untreatable Errors

A treatable error is "related to a linguistic structure that occurs in a rule-governed way.  It is treatable because the student writer can be pointed to a grammar book or set of rules to resolve the problem" (23).  An untreatable error is "idiosyncratic, and the student will need to utilize acquired knowledge of the language to self-correct it" (23).  That is, some error is treatable only through years of experience reading, writing, and speaking English.  Here are some tips for responding to many types of error:

• Try to find what Ferris calls "patterns of error."  Look for a few common errors that are repeated throughout the paper and provide feedback to each error as a whole, instead of responding to each error individually.  "This selective error-correction strategy helps students learn to make focused passes through their texts to find particular types of errors to which they may be most prone and to master grammatical terms and rules related to those specific errors" (50).

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