Humanising Language Teaching
Year 1; Issue 4; June 1999

My students' self-correction strategies in writing tasks

By Ana Robles, Spanish Secondary

Page 2 of 3

• Rosa says: "I see the story as a big photograph, in colour and I hear myself telling the story aloud, repeating what I am writing down. I feel the excitement of going on holidays. I think whole sentences, sometimes in English, if they are easy things, sometimes in Spanish. I never hear the sentences, I see them written.

  When I write them down I check that they make sense and if they don't, I remember the rules I know and I hear myself checking with those rules. I usually notice if there are mistakes and I always read my compositions several times before handing them down to the teacher"

Rosa has a very elaborate strategy. She sets up her story using visual, auditory and and kinaesthetic elements. Then she transcribes the story into words visually. She focuses at sentence level whenever possible. When she focus at word level she checks, visually, with the grammar rules she knows. When things become really difficult she adds sound, and hears herself repeating the words and checking. She usually gets a kinaesthetic 'go ahead' signal.

Rosa is both fluent and accurate. Her compositions are much better than average. She makes few mistakes and usually related at trying to use unfamiliar structures. She likes English very much and wants to become an English teacher some day.

As a teacher those four students present me with very different challenges. There are no big differences in the vocabulary and grammar those 4 students know, but there are huge differences in the strategies they use. It is clear that the strategies Rosa and Miguel use are much more efficient than the strategies Belén and Javier utilise.

Rosa and Miguel think in terms of sentences, not words, and that allows them to avoid many of the pitfalls Belén and Javier fall into routinely. Also Rosa and Miguel have a more complex set of checking strategies. Not only do they make less mistakes even before they write, they are better equipped to spot those mistakes on their own and self-correct.

It is important to note that the strategies Rosa and Miguel use have little in common with the strategies advanced students use. Rosa and Miguel rely heavily on their mother tongue and telling them to go straight for English is not likely to have an effect. In other words, I can't lend them my strategies, and, in any case, theirs are good enough. Rosa and Miguel strategies would be, however, very useful for Javier and Belén. To improve their performance Javier and Belén need to improve their strategies much more than they need to learn more words or more grammar patterns.

In fact, it is not content knowledge that makes the difference in Rosa's and Javier's compositions. Javier is in fact a hard-working student who is often disappointed because all his work yields no results. Asking him to work harder is not enough, what he needs to learn is to work more efficiently.

That means that just giving more writing exercises to Javier won't help him to learn to write better unless those exercises help him to change his focus from a word-to-word focus to a-whole- sentence pattern. In the same way, telling Belén to check her spelling again won't be very useful if she still goes on checking spelling by how the words feel to her instead of using a visual strategy (see the words).

It is in those two aspects, focusing at sentence level and using visual strategies to compare sentence structure and spelling that I find the key differences between strong and weaker students.

And if those are the key strategies, the next question, naturally, is how can I help Javier and Belén to acquire them?

Making them aware of the different strategies available, in fact, making them aware that strategies do exist, is the first step. Knowing that there are several ways of doing the same task will help them to start searching for the way which better fits their learning style and specific needs.

From that awareness flows the third step: presenting them with alternative strategies and explaining them the advantages and disadvantages of the different strategies. Asking them about how they do specific tasks (like memorising vocabulary or checking spelling mistakes) and then discussing the different answers with the group can be an awareness raising activity.

Students very often classify themselves as either 'good' or 'bad' at English (or Maths, or History, or Tennis). The awareness that 'being good at English" is largely a matter of developing the right strategies, and not an inborn trait can, just by itself, generate tremendous changes in a student's strategies.

And naturally then we have to provide opportunities and activities for them to explore and practise alternatives strategies. Which means designing class activities in such a way that the 'right' strategies are used, as part of the activity.

For example, one of the things I have learnt to do with students like Javier is to teach them to always check their compositions using grammar cards. Before I even look at it they have to check it at sentence level. Then, when I correct their composition I use a correction code. I mark where the mistakes are and what sort of mistake each is. The student, then, has to check the composition again and try to solve the puzzle on his own. Only when he has done that do I give him the 'solution'.

The whole process aims to help 'Javier' to develop a more efficient strategy, one where he focuses at sentence level and where he develops his own correction strategies so that he learns how to work, nor harder, but more efficiently.

This is the questionnaire I passed my students. (It was in their mother tongue.)