error correction - chandler

The efficacy of various kinds of error feedbackfor improvement in the accuracy and

fluency of L2 student writing

Jean Chandler*

New England Conservatory of Music and Simmons College, 15 Leonard Avenue,

Cambridge, MA 02139, USA

Abstract

This research uses experimental and control group data to show that students’ correction

of grammatical and lexical error between assignments reduces such error in subsequent

writing over one semester without reducing fluency or quality. A second study further

examines how error correction should be done. Should a teacher correct errors or mark

errors for student self-correction? If the latter, should the teacher indicate location or type

of error or both? Measures include change in the accuracy of both revisions and of

subsequent writing, change in fluency, change in holistic ratings, student attitudes toward

the four different kinds of teacher response, and time required by student and teacher for

each kind of response. Findings are that both direct correction and simple underlining of

errors are significantly superior to describing the type of error, even with underlining, for

reducing long-term error. Direct correction is best for producing accurate revisions, and

students prefer it because it is the fastest and easiest way for them as well as the fastest way

for teachers over several drafts. However, students feel that they learn more from self-

correction, and simple underlining of errors takes less teacher time on the first draft. Both

are viable methods depending on other goals.

# 2003 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Accuracy; Fluency; Second language writing; Error correction; Teacher feedback;

Student preferences; Asian college students

In 1996 Truscott wrote a review article in Language Learning contending that

all forms of error correction of L2 student writing are not only ineffective but

potentially harmful and should be abandoned. This was followed by a rejoinder by

Journal of Second Language Writing

12 (2003) 267–296

* Tel.: þ1-617-492-8153/699-3429.

E-mail address: [email protected] (J. Chandler).

1060-3743/$ – see front matter # 2003 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

doi:10.1016/S1060-3743(03)00038-9

Ferris (1999), and 1998 saw the publication of several books that gave significant

attention to the topic (e.g., Ferris & Hedgcock, 1998 and James, 1998).

Although the conclusions Truscott drew from the findings of previous research

were sometimes unsupported by the data in the original studies (e.g., see footnotes

1 and 2 below), reviving interest in the topic was beneficial since teachers of L2

composition must decide whether, how, and when to respond to students’

grammatical and lexical errors. As Lyster and Ranta (1997) noted, the questions

had been framed by Hendrickson in 1978, and yet ‘‘nearly 20 years later, we are

hardly any closer to knowing the answers to these deceptively simple questions’’

(p. 38). Ferris (1999) wrote, ‘‘If nothing else, reading Truscott’s essay and

reviewing the primary sources he cites has highlighted for me the urgent need

for new research efforts which utilize a variety of paradigms to examine a range of

questions that arise around this important topic’’ (p. 2).

The one implicit point of agreement in Truscott and Ferris’ articles was that the

existing data are insufficient to resolve the question of whether error correction can

be an effective way to improve the accuracy of L2 writing. The present study

addresses this issue directly by presenting empirical data comparing the improve-

ment in accuracy over a college semester of an experimental group that corrected

the grammatical and lexical errors marked by the teacher on each assignment

before writing the next assignment with a control group that did not. The first study

presented here addresses the question of whether to give error feedback or not, and

a second study sheds light on how it might be done. The second study examines the

effects of different kinds of teacher response to error on the correctness both of

revisions and of subsequent student writing. The four different kinds of teacher

response are: direct correction (hereafter Correction), underlining with marginal

description of type of error (hereafter Underlining with Description), marginal

description of type (hereafter Description), and simple underlining (hereafter

Underlining). Both studies also examine the effect of error correction on fluency,

and the second study measures change in writing quality over the semester using

holistic ratings. The second study also investigates student preferences and the time

required by student and teacher for various kinds of feedback methods.

Literature review

There are studies that did not find error feedback by the teacher to be

significantly more effective for developing accuracy in L2 student writing than

content-related comments or no feedback (e.g., Kepner, 1991; Polio, Fleck, &

Leder, 1998; Semke, 1984; Sheppard, 1992) but they need to be examined closely.

Kepner (1991) did not find that college students who received surface-level error

correction made significantly fewer errors in their journals than those who

received message-related comments, but the students apparently were not

required to do anything with the teacher’s corrections. Semke’s (1984) finding

of lack of effect of error correction on accuracy and negative effect on fluency

268 J. Chandler / Journal of Second Language Writing 12 (2003) 267–296

may not have been due entirely to the different treatment methods but also to the

differences in the quantity of writing practice. To receive A’s the group receiving

content-focused comments had to write twice as much as the groups receiving

corrections or corrections and comments; the group that self-corrected wrote

much less new material because of the time it took to make revisions. Similarly, in

Polio et al.’s (1998) study, the experimental group receiving error correction were

assigned to write half as many journal entries as the control group because of their

editing activities. Both groups in this study improved in accuracy, but there was no

significant difference between them. In Sheppard’s (1992) study, the only measure

on which there was a statistically significant difference between the gain of the

two groups was on percentage of correct punctuation.

On the other hand, there are studies demonstrating the efficacy of error

feedback from the teacher, for example, Ashwell (2000), Cardelle and Corno

(1981), Fathman and Whalley (1990),1 Ferris (1997), Ferris and Roberts (2001),

and Frantzen and Rissell (1987). These studies, however, measured accuracy only

on rewrites or on tests so it remains an open question whether students who got

error correction would write more accurately on future assignments.

Several studies (Ferris, Chaney, Komura, Roberts, & McKee, 2000; Ferris &

Roberts, 2001; Frantzen, 1995; Lalande, 1982; Lee, 1997; Robb, Ross, &

Shortreed, 1986) investigated the effects of different types of teacher feedback

on error in student writing. For example, Lalande’s (1982) experimental group of

U.S. students of German as a second language improved in grammatical accuracy

on subsequent writing after using an error code to rewrite, whereas the control

group, which received direct correction from the teacher, actually made more

errors on the essay at the end of the semester. However, the difference between the

groups’ improvement was not statistically significant. On the other hand, in

Frantzen’s 1995 study of U.S. college students of intermediate Spanish, both the

grammar-supplementation group receiving direct correction and the nongrammar

group whose errors were marked but not corrected improved in overall grammar

usage on the post essay. Neither group showed significant improvement in written

fluency over the semester, however. All four of Robb et al.’s (1986) treatment

groups of Japanese college students learning English improved in various

measures of accuracy after receiving different types of error feedback2 — direct

correction, notation of the type of error using a code, notation in the text of the

location of error, and marginal feedback about the number of errors in the line. All

of Robb et al.’s treatment groups improved in fluency and in syntactic complexity.

But neither the Lalande (1982) or the Robb, Ross, and Shortreed (1986) study

had control groups which received no correction, and neither found statistically

significant differences between the various teacher response types. Lizotte (2001)

1 Nevertheless, referring to Fathman and Walley’s research, Truscott concluded (1996, p. 339),

‘‘Nothing in this study suggests a positive answer [in favor of error correction].’’2 Truscott concluded from the fact that there were no statistical differences between the four

treatment groups in Robb et al.’s study (1986, p. 331) — ‘‘grammar correction’s futility . . . showed’’

— even though there were increases in three different measures of accuracy by all four groups.

J. Chandler / Journal of Second Language Writing 12 (2003) 267–296 269

reported gains with Hispanic bilingual and ESL students of a low–intermediate

English proficiency. After introducing students to errors using a code, Lizotte

indicated only the location of errors for student self-correction. His students

reduced errors in their writing significantly over one semester at the same time

that they made significant gains in fluency (numbers of words written in a

specified amount of time). Like Robb et al., Lizotte did not have a control group

since he could not justify, either to himself as the teacher or to his students,

providing no error feedback.

Only Ferris and Roberts (2001) and Lee (1997) had control groups that received

no error correction. Lee (1997) studied EFL college students in Hong Kong and

found that students were significantly more able to correct errors that were

underlined than errors that were either not marked or only indicated by a check in

the margin. Ferris and Roberts (2001) studied ESL students from a U.S. university

and found that two groups that received corrective feedback (either on type of

error or on location) significantly outperformed the control group (no feedback)

on the self-editing task, but there were no significant differences between the two

experimental groups. Neither of these studies measured the effect of these

treatments on the accuracy of student writing over time.

The one study that dealt with the effects of various kinds of teacher feedback on

accuracy of both revision and subsequent writing, Ferris et al. (2000), claimed that

direct correction of error by the teacher led to more correct revisions (88%) than

indirect feedback (77%). This study has not been published, but Ferris (2002,

p. 20) discussed the findings: ‘‘However, over the course of the semester, students

who received primarily indirect feedback reduced their error frequency ratios

substantially more than the students who received mostly direct feedback.’’ This

2000 study was, however, descriptive rather than quasi-experimental.

One topic that is not controversial is L2 students’ views toward teacher

feedback on their written errors. Studies (Chenowith, Day, Chun, & Luppescu,

1983; Cohen, 1987; Cohen & Cavalcanti, 1990; Ferris, 1995; Ferris & Roberts,

2001; Ferris et al., 2000; Hedgcock & Lefkowitz, 1994; Komura, 1999; Leki,

1991; Radecki & Swales, 1988; Rennie, 2000) have consistently reported that

student writers want such error feedback. According to Ferris and Roberts (2001),

the most popular type of feedback was underlining with description, followed by

direct correction, and underlining was third.

Study one: Does error correction improve accuracy in student writing?

The first study presented here tries to fill a gap in the research by examining

three questions: (a) Do students who are required to correct the grammatical and

lexical errors marked by the teacher make fewer such errors in their writing later

in the semester? (b) Do students who do not correct these errors underlined by the

teacher make fewer errors on subsequent writing? and (c) Is there any significant

difference in the improvement in grammatical and lexical accuracy of the two

groups on their writing later in the semester?


Method

Subjects

The students were all music majors, first- or second-year students at an

American conservatory. To be placed in this course, they had either scored

between 540 and 575 on the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) or

they had completed a year-long intermediate English as a Second Language

(ESL) course at the same institution the previous year with a grade of B� or

better, after scoring at least 500 on the TOEFL. One class (the control group)

consisted of 16 undergraduates from East Asia (Korea, Japan, China, and

Taiwan), and the other (the experimental group) contained 15 similar students.

Each class had only one male student. Although students were not randomly

assigned to the classes, there was no indication of systematic differences between

them, and both classes were taught by the same teacher-researcher.

Setting

These college ESL classes had a communicative orientation.3 The goal of the

course was to improve the ability of these high intermediate/advanced students to

read and write in English. In the ESL curricular sequence there was one additional

one-semester course between this one and the traditional first year composition

course required of all students at the conservatory. The classes met for 50 min

twice a week over 14 weeks. During these 24 h of class time, selections from

various autobiographical writings were read and discussed, both to practice

reading skills and to point out features of good writing. In addition, students

spent some class time reading reviews written by published writers and by other

students, sometimes watched videos of autobiographical stories, sometimes did

pre-writing activities, and occasionally discussed common errors in student

writing for 5–10 min. The goal of homework assignments was extensive practice

in reading and writing; students could choose an autobiography to read and review

and were assigned to write their own autobiography.

This genre was certainly not a new or particularly difficult one4 for these

students, who were highly literate in their own language and had previously read

biographies, autobiographies, and other narrative writing. At the same time, most

of these Asian students reported on a teacher-made questionnaire administered at

the beginning of the year that they had not had extensive practice in expressive

writing in high school in their first language (most said that their writing

experience was limited to ‘‘reports’’), and certainly not in English. The majority

3 The fact that the setting is a class with a communicative orientation may be important since Lucy

Fazio (2001) found no positive effect on accuracy of error correction on elementary school children’s

journals and concluded that it was due to their classes’ saturation with focus on form.4 Studies with native English-speaking students (e.g., Craig, 1981; Quellmalz, Capell, & Chou,

1982; Stone, 1981) also found narrative writing to be relatively easier than other genres.


had had quite a bit of training in English grammar, however. Therefore, students

were given extensive practice in reading and writing in a genre and about content

they were familiar with in order to focus on improving both their reading and

writing fluency and the grammatical and lexical accuracy of their self-expression

in writing English.

Various invention strategies from a process approach to writing, such as free

writing or peer discussion in pairs before writing, were demonstrated in class.

Multiple drafts were assigned, but no peer reading was done on this autobio-

graphical writing out of respect for student privacy and preferences. (Peer

feedback was required later in the semester before revision of book reviews

students wrote on the autobiographies they read.)

The teacher gave both content and error feedback on the first draft of the

autobiographical assignments. The teacher always gave a brief positive end

comment on the content of the writing. Although the teacher also occasionally

made more specific marginal comments on the content, praising vivid images or

word choices or asking for more detail or clarification, most of the teacher

feedback was on errors in grammar and usage because the writing generally was

otherwise quite acceptable. (See sample of student writing in Fig. 1).

Although the teacher underlined 16 errors in these 102 words, she considered

the content of the writing to be good. Similarly, Kroll (1990) found no correlation

between rhetorical competency and syntactic accuracy in essays written by

advanced ESL students, either at home or in class.

Grades on the autobiography were given only on the final product at the end of

the semester, and they were based on both quantity and overall quality, including

correctness. No deduction was made for errors on intermediate drafts; on the

contrary, the teacher emphasized that the goal was to learn from errors.

Design and measures

The ESL writing classes in which this study was conducted provided an

appropriate setting to test the research questions because the first five written

homework assignments were identical: Students were simply told to write

approximately five typed, double-spaced pages about their own life. (Although

various aspects of autobiographical writing, e.g., describing events, people, and

places, were discussed in class during the semester, any or all of these could be

used in each assignment, and students could write about their lives in any order,

not just chronologically.) Thus, over the semester, each student’s goal was to write

about 25 pages of autobiographical writing in addition to a book review.

Both classes were taught by the same teacher-researcher in the same way and

both received error feedback. The only difference was that the experimental group

was required to revise each assignment, correcting all the errors underlined by the

teacher before submitting the next assignment, whereas the control group did all

the corrections of their underlined errors toward the end of the semester after the

first drafts of all five homework assignments had been written. The rationale for


this arrangement arose from the results of a previous questionnaire, where the

teacher had ascertained that the vast majority of students wanted the teacher to

mark every error. Since the students felt so strongly about this, the teacher could

only justify the treatment of the control group by offering them the same treatment

as the experimental group later in the semester after the first draft of the fifth

assignment was completed and the data collection for the study ended. Therefore,

the control group corrected their errors in several homework assignments later in

the semester after the data for this study had been collected (see Fig. 2). For both

groups, after students had tried to correct their errors based on the teacher’s

underlining of them, the teacher provided direct correction for any remaining

errors or ones that had been corrected incorrectly.

In both cases, the fifth chapter of the autobiography was written 10 weeks after

the first chapter, and the same teacher-researcher tried to underline every

grammatical and lexical error on all student texts. Fig. 2 shows the schedule

of data collection and feedback for the two groups.

The dependent measure in this first study was a calculation of error rate on the

first and fifth writing assignments. Although the assignments were all to write five

pages, they did not in fact yield texts of exactly the same length; therefore to

control for these small differences in text length, a measure of errors per 100

words was calculated (total number of errors/total number of words � 100).

One of the reasons Truscott gives for the putative harmful effects of error

correction is its negative effect on fluency. Wolfe-Quintero, Inagaki, and Kim

(1998) define fluency as ‘‘rapid production of language’’ (p. 117). For most

previous research studies, the measure of fluency used has been number of words

written. However, in this study, since length was stipulated in the assignment, a

different measure of fluency was used, i.e., the amount of time it took to write each

assignment.5 I investigated this question by asking each student to keep a record

of the total amount of time spent on writing each assignment. The time each

student reported spending on the first and on the fifth assignments was then

calculated per 100 words, and the change over the semester was used as an

I was born in the end of culture revolution. Since my mother’s family is ‘the blacks’ instead of

‘the reds’, one of my grandparents three children was to send somewhere afar, of course, they let

the daughter in order to keep the sons close. My mother was sent to Gui Zhou. Right before the

due date, she was to go to shanghai to give birth where she would actually know someone. The

night before she leaves, she washed her sheets, packup, up till the woe hour, and certainly

before we both could scream, I was born around 6 O’clock in the morning.

Note: Used with permission

Fig. 1. Sample of student writing from the first assignment.

5 Chenowith and Hayes (2001) also used words written per minute as a measure of fluency.


additional outcome measure. Then the experimental group and the control group

were compared in terms of these changes over the semester in time spent writing

the same amount and kind of text.

Procedures: marking of errors

The categories of errors marked appear in Fig. 3. Fourteen of them are taken

from Azar’s Guide for Correcting Compositions (as cited in Brock & Walters,

1992, p. 123): singular–plural, word form, word choice, verb tense, add or omit a

word, word order, incomplete sentence, spelling, punctuation, capitalization,

article, meaning not clear, and run-on sentence. I added verb voice (active versus

passive) in addition to verb tense, word division in addition to spelling, and

sentence structure in addition to run-on sentences and fragments. I also added

categories of idiom, awkward (not grammatically incorrect but quite infelicitous

stylistically), subject–verb agreement, repetition or redundancy, pronoun, and

need for new paragraph in order to cover all the errors these students made even

though most of them were not frequent.

No argument is being made here that this error categorization system is better

or worse than other possible ones. It is more exhaustive than most; for example,

Ferris and Roberts (2001) used only five categories. The Asian students in the

present studies made frequent article errors so they were counted separately and

grouped (no matter whether they were errors of insertion, deletion, or wrong

article), whereas preposition errors were recorded as either insertion or deletion

errors or wrong word. Similarly, run-ons and fragments were recorded as separate

Class Experimental Control 3 Hand in chapter 1 Hand in chapter 1 4 Get errors underlined by teacher Get errors underlined by teacher 5 Correct errors on chapter 1 6 Get direct correction by teacher 7 Hand in chapter 2 Hand in chapter 2 8 Get errors underlined by teacher Get errors underlined by teacher 9 Correct errors on chapter 2 10 Get direct correction by teacher 11 Hand in chapter 3 Hand in chapter 3 12 Get errors underlined by teacher Get errors underlined by teacher 13 Correct errors on chapter 3 14 Get direct correction by teacher 15 Hand in chapter 4 Hand in chapter 4 16 Get errors underlined by teacher Get errors underlined by teacher 17 Correct errors on chapter 4 18 Get direct correction by teacher 19 Hand in chapter 5, end data collection Hand in chapter 5, end data collection 20 Get errors underlined by teacher Get errors underlined by teacher; correct

errors on chapters 1 and 2 21 Correct errors on chapter 5 Get direct correction of chaps 1 & 2; correct

errors on chaps 3, 4 & 5 22 Get direct correction by teacher Get direct correction of chaps 3, 4 & 5 23 Final draft of complete autobio Final draft of complete autobio

Fig. 2. Data collection and error correction schedule.


error categories and not as punctuation and capitalization errors. No effort was

made to weight the different kinds of errors. What categorization system is used is

not as important for purposes of this study as using the same system for pre- and

post-measures.

Thus it was important for both studies to have the same teacher-researcher

marking all errors in the same way. Another rater who is a college ESL teacher

marked 10% of the papers in order to calculate interrater agreement. The

percentage agreement on what was an error was 76%. This was calculated by

dividing the number of errors marked by only one rater (and not both) by the total

Fig. 3. Examples of error types.


number of errors (an average of each rater’s count), as Polio (1997) did. See also

Roberts (1999) for a discussion of the difficulty of getting high levels of interrater

reliability on accuracy measures.

One rater considered some things errors that the other one did not. For example,

the other rater marked many more article omissions than I did, especially with the

names of musical instruments in phrases such as ‘‘play piano,’’ ‘‘practice bassoon,’’

and ‘‘teach flute.’’ (I did not mark these as errors because of the results of a previous

study I had done on grammaticality judgments of article usage by native English-

speaking musicians [Chandler, 1994].) He also marked more omissions of commas

as errors. On the other hand, I marked an error every time there was not a new

paragraph for a new speaker in dialogue, and the other rater did not.

Thus, having the same teacher-researcher marking all errors makes compar-

isons possible between methods and between pre and post results that would not

be as easy with more than one marker, given the difficulty of attaining high

interrater reliability in marking so many kinds of errors on spontaneous writing

production. High interrater reliability on categorization of errors naturally tends

to be even more difficult to attain than on identification of errors (Polio, 1997). For

this reason, no attempt is being made in these studies to draw conclusions about

types of errors that were corrected or improved over time.

What is important for these studies is intrarater reliability rather than interrater

reliability, and the intrarater correlation of two markings of the same paper

separated by several years’ time was .92 for categorization as well as identifica-

tion of errors. A confirmation of this high intrarater reliability was done by an

independent rater on the teacher’s marking of essays by both the control and

experimental groups on the first and last assignments.

Results

Analysis of covariance was used to test for initial differences and differences in

outcome between the experimental and control groups. Tables 1 and 2 show the

results for accuracy, i.e., number of errors for each 100 words of text. There was

no significant difference between the experimental group and the control group on

the first assignment (t ¼ 2:05, P ¼ :175). The mean number of errors per 100

words for the control group was similar on the first and fifth assignments; there

was no significant difference between the control group’s error rates at the two

times (t ¼ �0:90, P ¼ :380).

The experimental group, on the other hand, went from an average of 7.8

grammatical and lexical errors per 100 words on the first assignment to 5.1 errors

on the fifth assignment, and this improvement in error rate between the two

assignments was statistically significant (t ¼ 4:05, P ¼ :001). A reduction of 2.7

errors per 100 words amounted to an average reduction of 34 errors on a five-page

paper from the first to the fifth assignment. Analysis of covariance (see Tables 1

and 2) also demonstrated a statistically significant (t ¼ 3:04, P ¼ :005) difference


in improvement in accuracy over the 10 weeks between the experimental group

(which corrected their errors between assignments) and the control group (which

did not). Nine of the 16 students in the control group actually had a higher error

rate on the fifth assignment than they did on the first, whereas only two of 15

students in the experimental group did. Moreover, in a striking contrast with the

control group, the experimental group showed much less variance between

students in their error rate by the end of the semester (see Table 1).

As an additional confirmation of these results, I regressed the change in the

number of errors from the first assignment to the last assignment for each group

(see Table 3). For the control group, neither factor explains much, but for the

experimental group, the number of errors on the first assignment and the intercept

are both significant. The negative coefficient on errors at time 1 suggests that the

improvement for the experimental teaching method falls as errors increase; e.g.,

students who have good skills to start with benefit more than ones who are less

proficient. However, the significant positive intercept suggests an improvement

for the experimental group regardless of the starting level.

Table 1

Accuracy: means and standard deviations on errors per 100 words for two groups and two testing

times

Group ANCOVA outcomes

Experimental (n ¼ 15) Control (n ¼ 16) F P

Chapter 1

Mean number of errors 7.8 6.0 �1.37 .183

Standard deviation 3.2 4.1

Chapter 5

Mean number of errors 5.1 6.9 1.45 .164


Change

Mean number of errors �2.7 0.9 3.04 .005

Table 2

Accuracy: analysis of covariance for error rate per 100 words

Source of variation d.f. SS MS F P

Model* 2 177.74 88.87 10.27 .0005

Treatment group 1 56.50 56.50 6.53 .0163

Errors on chapter 1 1 78.23 78.23 9.04 .0055

Residual 28 242.40 8.66

Total 30 420.14 14.00

* The model for this analysis hypothesizes that variation in change in error rate is caused by

the group the students are in (control or experimental) and their error rate on the first assignment

(Errors 1). The P values are statistically significant for Model, Group, and Errors 1, indicating that

this model has significant explanatory value. See text for interpretation.


Table 3

Regression of the change in the number of errors from chapters 1 to 5 for two groups

Control group d.f. SS MS

Model 1 24.93 24.93

Residual 14 202.04 14.43

Total 15 226.97 15.13

Dependent variable ¼ change Coefficient S.E. t P

�0.31 0.24 �1.31 .21

2.77 1.72 1.61 .13

Experimental group d.f. SS MS

Model 1 65.32 65.32

Residual 13 28.35 2.18

Total 14 93.67 6.69

Dependent variable ¼ change Coefficient S.E. t P

�0.68 0.12 �5.47 .00

2.58 1.04 0.03 .03

A two-sample t test indicates that the coefficient for Errors 1 in the control group is significantly

different from the coefficient for Errors 1 in the experimental group

N Mean S.D.

x 16 �0.31 0.24

y 15 �0.68 0.12

Combined 31 �0.49 0.26

Satterthwaite’s d:f: ¼ 22:81. Ha: difference > 0, t ¼ 5:36, P > t ¼ 0:00.

Table 4

Fluency: means and standard deviations on minutes per 100 words for two groups and two testing

times

Group ANCOVA outcomes

Experimental (n ¼ 14) Control (n ¼ 12) F P

Chapter 1

Mean number of minutes 36.9 37.4 0.00 .952


Chapter 5



Change




Tables 4 and 5 show that both groups increased significantly in fluency over the

10 weeks and that there was no significant difference between the two groups in

this improvement. The control group wrote the fifth assignment 17 min per 100

words faster than the first assignment (t ¼ 3:65, P ¼ :004), and the experimental

group improved by 16 min for the same amount of text during the same time

period (t ¼ 2:50, P ¼ :027). The fact that the standard deviations were high

indicates either that students spent very different amounts of time on an assign-

ment or that they calculated the time differently (e.g., one student may have

included thinking time while another may have counted only drafting time) or

both. This fact, however, does not invalidate the finding since the same students’

self-reports on the first and last assignments are being compared.

Summary and discussion

The results of this study demonstrate that the accuracy (correctness of English)

of student writing over 10 weeks improved significantly more if these high

intermediate East Asian college students were required to correct their errors than

if they were not. The fact that the control group, which did no error correction

between assignments, did not increase in accuracy while the experimental group

showed a significant increase would seem to refute the assertion that having

students correct errors is ineffective. Moreover, this increase in accuracy by the

experimental group was not accompanied by a decline in fluency over the

semester, as measured by self-reports of time students spent writing the same

amount and kind of text. On the contrary, both the experimental and the control

groups in the present study showed a significant increase in fluency over the

semester, a finding which corresponds to those reported in Robb et al.’s (1986)

research on Japanese EFL students and Lizotte’s (2001) study of Hispanic

bilingual and ESL students in a U.S. community college.

Although conventional wisdom in the field advocates that teachers respond to

content first and to form only in a later draft (Sommers, 1982; Zamel, 1985), there

Table 5

Fluency: analysis of variance for time to write: minutes per 100 words

Source of variation d.f. SS MS F

Between subjects

Group 1 0.00 0.00 0.00

Errors on chapter 1 24 0.95 0.04

Within subjects

Time 1 0.36 0.36 16.10**

Group � Time 1 0.00 0.00 0.01

Errors on chapter 5 24 0.52 0.02

** P ¼ :001.


is no indication that this is necessary, at least when students are writing in a genre

which is relatively easy for them, such as the autobiographical writing in this study

or the journal writing in Fathman and Whalley’s 1990 research. In both of these

studies, comments on content and accuracy were given simultaneously, and when

that was done in Fathman and Whalley’s study, student rewrites improved in both

content and accuracy. In a recent study, Ashwell (2000) found no significant

difference in student gains in accuracy or content scores on a third draft following

three different patterns of teacher feedback on the first two drafts: (a) the con-

ventional response (giving feedback on content first and feedback on form in a later

draft), (b) the reverse pattern, or (c) one in which form and content feedback were

mixed. All of these patterns, however, were superior to giving no feedback.

What the findings of the present study suggest is that if students did not revise

their writing based on feedback about errors, having teachers mark errors was

equivalent to giving no error feedback since the students’ new writing did not

increase in correctness over one semester. (This probably explains Kepner’s 1991

findings since she gave rule reminders as error correction feedback but did not

require revisions.) If students did make error corrections, their subsequent new

writing was more accurate without a reduction in fluency.

In summary, mere practice resulted in a significant increase in fluency for both

groups; that is, at the end of the semester they were able to write the same amount

and kind of text (in the same context of a homework assignment) in much less

time, according to self-reports. However, mere practice without error correction

did not produce more correct subsequent writing, whereas when students cor-

rected their errors before writing the next assignment, their first drafts became

more accurate over the semester.

Study two: The effects of various kinds of error correction

Having answered, in the affirmative, the question of whether to have students

correct their errors, the research turned to the question of how the teacher should

give error feedback. Should teachers simply correct the errors or should they mark

the errors for student self-correction? If the latter, is it more effective for a teacher

to indicate the location or the type of error or both?

Method

Design and subjects

In this second study, these questions are approached by looking at change in the

accuracy of both revisions and subsequent new writing over the semester, change

in the fluency of student writing as measured by self-reports of the time it took to

write the same amount and kind of text, change in the quality of student writing as

measured by holistic ratings, student attitudes toward four different kinds of


teacher response, the time it took students to make the corrections after each kind

of response, and the time required of the teacher to make the various kinds of

responses.

This second study was conducted in the same ESL writing course as the one

reported above but in a different year with different students. Part of one class

session was spent explaining the different kinds of errors listed in Fig. 3. Each

student received a sheet listing the abbreviations and an example of each error.

Besides the teacher feedback described below, the other major difference between

the two studies was that in the second study students were asked to write 40 pages,

instead of 25, of autobiographical text over the semester. In response to five

identical homework assignments, they wrote about eight pages of text each time6

and revised them after receiving feedback from the teacher and before writing the

next assignment, as the experimental class had done in the first study (after the

teacher underlined all their errors). Requiring rewriting, no matter what kind of

teacher feedback, including direct correction, ensured that the student read the

teacher’s response carefully, though there was no penalty for errors on the first

draft. As described above, the grade was based on the quality (including

correctness) and quantity of the final draft after students had made as many

revisions as they chose.

The second study was done with a total of 36 students in two sections of the

same course taught in the same way by the same teacher. The first class contained

1 Hispanic and 20 Asian undergraduate students, 18 females and 3 males, and the

second class had 15 East Asian students, 13 females and 2 males.

In this partially balanced incomplete block design, each student received four

different kinds of teacher feedback, in different orders, in response to the first four

chapters of his or her autobiographical writing. Having each student receive each

kind of feedback ensures that the treatment groups are identical as well as

ensuring a larger number of students in each group than if the 36 students had

been divided into four treatment groups. It is important to give the treatments

in different orders so as not to confound order and type of treatment. The

four treatments used were (a) Correction (see e.g., Fig. 4), (b) Underlining

with Description (see Fig. 5), (c) Description of type only (see Fig. 6), and

(d) Underlining (see Fig. 7).

The outcome measures were: (a) number of errors per 100 words on both the

revision and on the subsequent chapter before revision (accuracy), (b) holistic

ratings of overall writing quality of the first draft of both the first and last chapters

of each student’s autobiography, (c) time students reported spending writing each

chapter (fluency), (d) immediate student responses to each feedback type,

including the time it took to make corrections, and to a questionnaire comparing

the four types at the end of the semester, and (e) a rough comparison of time spent

by the teacher in giving each method of feedback, both initially and over two

drafts.

6 Lengthening the assignment from five to eight pages should increase the effect of each treatment.


Fig. 4. Correction.

Fig. 5. Underline and Describe.

Fig. 6. Describe.


Fig. 7. Underline.

Teacher responses

Response 1=direct correction Response 2=underline and describe Response 3=describe Response 4=underline

Number of students receiving different orders of responses

Number of students Order of response types 1 1 2 4 3 2 1 4 3 2 1 2 4 3 1 2 2 1 4 3 1 3 2 4 1 2 3 2 1 4 3 3 1 2 4 3 4 3 2 1 4 4 3 1 2

Number of students receiving each response after each assignment

Response 1 Response 2 Response 3 Response 4

After assignment 1 4 4 6 6 After assignment 2 6 4 6 4 After assignment 3 6 5 4 5 After assignment 4 4 7 4 5

Fig. 8. Teacher responses.


Procedures

Holistic ratings

A holistic rating session was conducted according to the guidelines of the

Educational Testing Service. All six of the raters were experienced college ESL

teachers. When holistic ratings are done, the papers are rated relative to others in

the same rating pool. Therefore, in order to measure change in writing quality

over time, it is necessary for all of the papers written in response to both the first

and the last assignments to be in the same rating pool, allowing later for direct

pre–post comparisons for each student. From similar papers in the first study,

anchor papers were chosen, which the researcher regarded as good examples of

each rating, and the raters were trained on them. Two independent raters then

rated each paper on a scale of 1–6 (with higher being better), and their scores were

averaged. If the ratings were more than one point apart, a third rater also rated the

paper, and all three ratings were averaged.

Different teacher responses

Approximately equal numbers of students got each response type after each of

the four first assignments. See Fig. 8 for numbers of students getting various

orders of responses. Therefore, change in number of errors per 100 words on the

assignment following each response type is used as an outcome measure rather

than change in errors from the first assignment to the second, etc.

This analysis was done only on the 20 students who corrected all their errors

after each response before writing the next assignment, as intended. These 20

included 4 males and 16 females, 4 students from Taiwan, 2 from the People’s

Republic of China, 6 from Japan, 1 from Mexico, and 7 from Korea.

Results

Overall effects on accuracy, fluency, and quality

Since all of the students corrected their errors before writing the next

assignment in this second study, I wanted to see if they showed the same

improvement as the experimental group in the first study. Indeed, student

writing improved significantly over the semester in terms of both accuracy and

fluency. A t test of the difference in the mean number of grammatical and

lexical errors per 100 words on chapter 1 (10.1) and on chapter 5 (8.0) was

statistically significant at the .05 level (see Table 6). Students took significantly

less time to write the same amount of text in each succeeding chapter — from

37 min per 100 words in the first chapter to 15 min per 100 words in the last

chapter. A t test showed this improvement in fluency over the semester to be

statistically significant at the .0003 level. These results with a different group


confirm with a larger sample of 36 the finding for the experimental group in the

first study.

In this second study, I also wanted to find out if the reduction in error rate

translated into a measurable improvement in writing quality as judged by holistic

ratings, or conversely, if students were making fewer errors and writing more

quickly because their writing was less complex or otherwise of lower quality at

the end of the semester than it had been at the beginning.

Results showed no significant change in holistic ratings over the semester,

though the ratings for the final assignment were slightly higher than those for the

first; on a six-point scale the mean ratings for chapter 1 were 2.8 and for chapter 5

were 3.1. Thus there was no evidence that the writing at the end of the course was

less interesting or complex, judging from holistic ratings. The interrater correla-

tion was .8; since at least two raters scored each paper, the reliability estimate for

the composite rating was .9 (Rosnow & Rosenthal, 1999, p. 143).

Effects of various kinds of teacher feedback on revision and

subsequent writing

Table 7 indicates, not surprisingly, that students made significantly fewer errors

on their revisions if the teacher had written in corrections. The mean number of

Table 6

Changes in accuracy, fluency, and quality

Accuracy

Chapter 1 (n ¼ 36); mean number of errors per 100 words ¼ 10.1; S.D. ¼ 5.5

Chapter 5 (n ¼ 29); mean number of errors per 100 words ¼ 8.0; S.D. ¼ 4.3

P ¼ .05

Fluency

Chapter 1 (n ¼ 21); mean time to write 100 words ¼ 36.7 min; S.D. ¼ 16.2

Chapter 5 (n ¼ 9); mean time to write 100 words ¼ 15.0 min; S.D. ¼ 6.2

P ¼ .0003

Quality

Chapter 1 (n ¼ 36); mean holistic rating ¼ 2.8 (out of 6)

Chapter 5 (n ¼ 36); mean holistic rating ¼ 3.1 (out of 6)

Table 7

Analysis of variance with repeated measures: effect on accuracy of revisions

Teacher response Mean errors per 100 words in revisions S.D.

Correction (n ¼ 34) 1.1 2.4

Underlining and Description (n ¼ 27) 3.1 3.8

Description (n ¼ 27) 4.9 4.7

Underlining (n ¼ 30) 4.6 6.3

Fð4; 73Þ; P ¼ :004.


errors per 100 words on the first draft of the first chapter was 10.1. After

Correction, student text still had 1.1 errors per 100 words. The next most explicit

method of teacher response, Underlining with Description, produced the next

fewest errors on the revision: 3.1 per 100 words, indicating that students could

correct more than two-thirds of their errors in response to this method. Revisions

of papers marked only with Description of error type contained 4.9 errors per 100

words, while Underlining produced text with 4.6 errors per 100 words on the

revision, showing that students were able to correct more than half their errors if

only the type or location was pointed out. Analysis of variance shows these

differences to be significant at the .004 level.

However, the best measure of what students learned from various teacher

responses to error in their writing is their ability to write a later, different text more

correctly (as opposed to the revision of the same chapter; see Tables 8 and 9).

This analysis was done by comparing each student’s error rate after each

treatment with the same student’s error rate on the previous assignment (since

students got the treatments in different orders). Table 8 demonstrates that for the

group as a whole, treatments of either Correction or of Underlining resulted in

more accurate writing on the next assignment, while the other two treatments,

which involved describing the error type, had the opposite effect. Multivariate

analysis of variance showed these differences between treatment groups to be

statistically significant at the .04 level. MANOVA showed significant differences

between Correction and Underlining with Description, between Correction and

Description, between Underlining and Underlining with Description, and

between Underlining and Description, but not between Correction and Under-

lining or between Description and Underlining with Description.

Similarly, Table 9 shows that nine students produced their most correct

assignment subsequent to having the teacher simply correct the errors on the

assignment before, and seven students did so after the teacher feedback of simple

underlining, whereas the other response methods involving description preceded

the most accurate writing for only one to three students.

These results complicate the picture from the first study and from the data in

Table 6 above, both of which show that the writing of students who correct their

errors in response to teacher feedback generally increases in accuracy over the

semester.

Table 8

Multivariate analysis of variance with repeated measures: effect on accuracy of subsequent

assignment

Teacher response Mean change in errors per 100 words S.D.

Correction (n ¼ 20) �2.0 3.8

Underlining and Description (n ¼ 20) 0.9 4.0

Description (n ¼ 20) 1.8 3.8

Underlining (n ¼ 20) �1.6 3.0

Note. Negative numbers indicate improvement. Fð3; 31Þ; P ¼ :037.


Student preferences

Twenty-one students filled out questionnaires comparing the four different

teacher response methods at the end of the semester (see Table 10). They were

asked which of these ways made it easiest for them to correct their mistakes,

which way made it easiest to see what kind of mistakes they had made, which way

they learned the most from, which way helped them most to write correctly in the

future, and which way they liked the most. More than two-thirds of the students

considered the Correction response to be the easiest to correct; this agreed with

the objective data, as reported above. However, half or nearly half thought

Underlining with Description was the easiest way to see what kind of errors

they had made, that they had learned the most from this response, and that it had

been the most help in writing correctly in future. As shown above, the latter was

not an accurate judgment since the data show that both Correction and Under-

lining were significantly more effective at reducing error in subsequent writing

than Underlining with Description was. Half said they liked Correction the most,

with Underlining with Description second.

One student’s comment seemed to sum up the feelings of the majority: ‘‘I like

the ‘correction’ the most because it’s easier to change, but I have to say the

Table 9

Change in errors per 100 words from previous assignment for individual students after each feedback

method

Student After

Correction

After Underlining

with Description

After

Description

After

Underlining

1 �0.55 1.02 �0.17 �4.02*

2 �2.73* 0.95 �0.30 1.75

3 0.13* 2.62 7.05 0.38

4 �3.12 �0.54 7.07 �7.11*

5 �5.61 0.70 7.65 �5.64*

6 �2.25* �0.96 2.93 �0.76

7 �4.85* 3.73 0.72 �3.03

8 �5.08* 1.64 3.18 1.76

9 5.64 �4.00* �1.26 �2.90

10 0.35 �0.37 �1.17 �1.74*

11 �9.13* �6.66 7.57 �0.38

12 �4.70* 12.45 �1.40 �0.14

13 4.49 �0.79 2.40 �7.64*

14 0.86 6.39 �4.08* 2.99

15 0.05 3.35 0.96 �2.18*

16 �0.62 1.45 1.45 �1.02*

17 0.20 �0.52 �2.17* 2.12

18 �0.90 3.32 �1.50* 1.09

19 �4.27* �4.02 �1.11 �1.47

20 �8.25* �0.82 8.10 �3.32

Note. Negative numbers indicate improvement (fewer errors).* Best feedback method for individual student.


underline and describe helped me the most; I like that.’’ Another student agreed

that the Correction method was the easiest to correct ‘‘because you’ve already

written out the correct answers for us’’ and therefore she liked it best because it

took less time. She also agreed that Underlining with Description made it quite

easy to understand the mistakes she made. However, she felt that she learned the

most from the teacher response of Underlining ‘‘because I can look up for the

Table 10

Students’ responses

Year-end questionnaire (n ¼ 21)

1. Which way was easiest to correct mistakes?

Correction Underline and Describe Describe Underline

14 5 0 1*

2. Which way was easiest to see what kind of mistakes you made?


7 10 0 3*

3. Which way did you learn the most from?


2 9 5 5

4. Which way helped you most to write correctly in future?


4 10 2 5

5. Which way did you like most?


10 7 2 1*

Questionnaires after each teacher response method (n ¼ 16)

6. Could you understand it?

Yes Mostly Not much No

Correction 14 2 0 0

Underline and Describe 5 11 0 0

Describe 1 13 1 0*

Underline 4 9 3 0

Did you feel discouraged?

Yes Mostly Not much No

Correction 1 0 7 8

Underline and Describe 0 5 4 7

Describe 0 4 5 6*

Underline 0 1 9 6

Mean number of minutes students reported needing to make corrections to one assignment after each

method (n ¼ 14).

Correction: 47.5; Underline and Describe: 59.3; Describe: 78.6; Underline: 58.6.* Missing cases ¼ 1.


correct answers by myself, and this makes easier to remember the mistakes I made

so I won’t do it again.’’

In addition to the comparative questionnaire at the end of the semester, students

were asked to fill out a questionnaire immediately after experiencing each teacher

response and keep a record of how much time it took them to correct errors after

each method. They were asked if they understood the method, if they knew how to

make the corrections, if they needed to make many corrections, and if they felt

discouraged. They were given four response categories of (1) yes, (2) mostly or

somewhat, (3) not much or not too much, and (4) no.

Only the responses of the 16 students who filled out each of the four

questionnaires on time were tabulated. Again, not surprisingly, a large majority

of students answered ‘‘yes’’ that they understood the Correction response and said

they knew how to correct their errors after receiving it, whereas in response to the

other three teacher feedback methods, the majority replied that they ‘‘mostly’’

understood and that they ‘‘mostly’’ knew how to make corrections.

What was more interesting and puzzling7 was that there was less discourage-

ment after receiving teacher feedback of Underlining than after either Description

or Underlining with Description. In fact, after both Underlining and Correction,

94% of students (all but one) said they were not at all discouraged or not much.

After receiving the methods involving description, on the other hand, a third to a

quarter (4–5 students) said they felt ‘‘somewhat’’ discouraged.

According to student self-report, the mean time to correct errors varied from

47.5 min after Correction to 78.6 min after Description, with Underlining and

Underlining with Description in the middle at 58.6 and 59.3 min, respectively.

Teacher time required for different responses

The fastest way for teachers to respond to student errors on one draft, not

surprisingly, is simply to underline them (see Table 11).

Correction is the second fastest way. It took the teacher an average of 0.8 min

per 100 words for Underlining, whereas Correction required 0.9 min per 100

words, and both Underlining with Description and Description alone took 1.0 min

Table 11

Teacher’s response time

Teacher’s response Mean time per 100 words (min)

Correction 0.9

Underlining and Description 1.0

Description 1.0

Underlining 0.8

7 In hindsight, I wish I had interviewed some students about this, but by the time I analyzed these

data, all 36 students had departed for the summer.


per 100 words.8 Thus, given the assignment of 2000 words per chapter, it takes an

average of 16 min for the teacher to respond to one student’s first draft by

Underlining, 18 min by Correcting, and 20 min by Description or Underlining

with Description. For a class of 20, that is 5.3 h for Underlining, 6 h for

Correcting, or 6.7 h for Description of error type per assignment, or 26.5, 30,

or 33.5 h, respectively, for marking the class’s first draft on five assignments.

On the other hand, since students made significantly fewer errors in the next

revision after receiving Correction than the other feedback methods, total teacher

time responding to errors over two drafts of the same assignment is undoubtedly

less using Correction on the first draft than any of the other treatment methods.

Summary and discussion of findings and implications for practice

The first study shows that to increase accuracy in student writing teachers

should give error feedback and require students to make corrections. However,

according to the results of the second study, the question of whether to respond to

errors or not is too simplistic since not all error correction methods had the same

effect in increasing accuracy.

According to the results of both studies, having the teacher either correct or

underline for student self-correction all the grammatical and lexical errors in the

autobiographical writing of high intermediate to advanced ESL undergraduates,

followed by revision, resulted in a significant improvement in both accuracy

(errors per 100 words) and fluency (time to write 100 words) in subsequent writing

of the same type over the semester. Perhaps an average improvement of two errors

per 100 words does not seem like much over a semester, but when an assignment

is 2000 words, that is an average decrease of 40 errors from the first to the fifth

assignment.

In spite of an overall improvement in accuracy and fluency in the second study

from the first to the last assignment, there was no significant change in holistic

ratings of overall writing quality over 10 weeks. This is not surprising since other

studies have shown that writing quality is slow to show measurable effects (see

Hillocks, 1986) and since autobiographical writing is a genre that these students

were already relatively good at (see samples of their writing in Figs. 1 and 4–7).

(These same students have, however, shown significant improvement over one

semester in holistic ratings of other kinds of writing, such as analysis of poetry,

about which they were not as knowledgeable from the beginning.) Since there was

a gain of .3 over the semester on a holistic rating scale of 1–6, I conclude that the

improvement in correctness and speed did not come at the expense of overall

quality or syntactic or lexical complexity.

8 Clearly, what takes the most teacher time in any of these methods is identifying the error.

Correcting the error takes a little additional time but not as much as describing it. After it is identified

and described, the act of underlining adds nothing additional in such a crude measure.


In the first study a control group that did no revision after error feedback between

assignments made no improvement in accuracy on first drafts over the semester.

(This finding is similar to Ashwell’s, 2000 and Ferris & Roberts,’ 2001 ‘‘no

feedback groups,’’ which did not make significantly fewer errors on later drafts

of the same paper.) More surprisingly, results of the second study showed that

rewriting following teacher feedback methods of either marginal description of type

of error or even of such description plus underlining resulted in more errors on the

subsequent assignment even though students made fewer errors on revisions of the

same assignment. (For speculation as to causes of these results, see below.)

I’m guessing that the results indicate that two different processes were going on:

(a) In the case of direct correction, the students simply noticed the correct forms

as they transferred them into their next drafts — positive evidence, input for

acquisition. (b) In the case of underlining without description, the students relied

on previously acquired competence to self-edit (as native speakers tend to do,

when they correct their own writing). The two intermediate forms — providing

description but not the correction — simply muddied the water for the student

writers . . . In fact, one could argue that the descriptions with underlining actually

made the task harder for the students than simple underlining.9

The suggestion in the literature (e.g., Ferris, 2002) that students learn more (i.e.,

make fewer errors on subsequent writing) from either finding their own errors or

making their own corrections, rather than receiving corrections from the teacher,

was not borne out either in this study or in Robb et al. (1986). In fact, in the present

study, Correction by the teacher was the best of the four methods used, as measured

by the change in accuracy of the student writing which followed, though there was

no statistically significant difference between Correction and Underlining of

errors. The superiority of the Correction method may be due to the fact that,

not surprisingly, students are able to correct significantly more of their errors on

their revisions after this method than after teacher responses either describing the

type or noting the location of errors made, or both. Perhaps when ESL students can

see their errors corrected soon after writing, they internalize the correct form better.

Perhaps the greater cognitive effort expended in making their own corrections is

offset by the additional delay in knowing whether their own hypothesized

correction was in fact accurate. Correction by the teacher was also the most

popular with the students, probably because it was the fastest and easiest way for

them to revise.

Those in the literature who argue against students’ self-correction do so

because of its putative negative effect on student attitudes and fluency. Student

self-correction had no such negative effect in the present study. Although a

majority preferred the teacher to correct their paper because it was the easiest way

for them, they also felt that a teacher response of Underlining with Description

was the best way to learn not to make the errors in the future. One student

9 An anonymous reviewer of a previous draft put it this way,


commented, ‘‘I think if I can have Underline and Describe or Underline but not

just Correction, I’ll feel more helpful. Just Describe I need really long time to

correct; only Correction I feel I can’t learn them and I feel I don’t participate.’’

This finding that students felt they were learning more when self-correcting is in

accordance with Lalande’s (1982) study of American college learners of German

as a second language and with Ferris and Roberts’ (2001) and Leki’s (1991)

studies of ESL students’ preferences.

In the literature, fluency is usually a measure of how much students write. Not

surprisingly, students tend to write more when their writing is not being marked

for any kind of surface error than when it is. My measure of fluency was different:

Since students were assigned to write a certain number of pages, fluency was

measured by how long students said it took them to write the assignment.

Although this was a crude measure that had the problems of self-reports (students

probably interpreted in different ways the request to record their writing time and

some were undoubtedly more careful in keeping track than others), it also had

great face validity. Students appreciated this improvement in writing since one of

their greatest difficulties with English is how long it takes to do reading and

writing assignments. Over the course of the semester, students were able to write

the same amount of text in approximately half the time — while all of their texts

were being marked for surface error. Thus, student self-correction, as well as

correction by the teacher, was associated with both generally positive attitudes

and significant improvement in this measure of writing fluency.

Perhaps students judged Underlining with Description to be the best method of

teacher response to error to help them improve their writing in the future partly

due to the order of the questions on my questionnaire: The questions ‘‘Which way

did you learn the most from?’’ and ‘‘Which way helped you most to write

correctly in future?’’ followed ‘‘Which way was easiest to see what kind of

mistakes you made?’’ A majority of students answered ‘‘underline and describe’’

to all three questions. It is understandable that Underlining with Description

would be the easiest way to see what kind of errors had been made. However, this

response was not as effective as either Correction or Underlining in actually

increasing student accuracy on subsequent writing and took somewhat more time

for both students and teacher. Perhaps the categorization of types of errors

confused or distracted students on their next assignments — although Under-

lining with Description did help more than Underlining in revisions of the same

writing. Slightly more students reported being ‘‘somewhat’’ discouraged when

the teacher feedback involved description of errors than either Correction or

Underlining.

In fact, marginal description of type of error had the most negative effect

on accuracy of subsequent writing of any of the feedback methods used in

either study, perhaps because of student attitudes toward it. Maybe even students

who have studied English grammar extensively in the past find it too cogni-

tively demanding to identify an error from a description without location.

It took students far longer to correct their errors after this method of teacher


response than any other tried in this study, and both methods involving descrip-

tion took slightly more time for the teacher to give than either Correction or

Underlining.

In summary, what the second study shows is that among the methods tried

in this study, Correction resulted in the largest increase in accuracy both

for revisions and for subsequent writing. Naturally, it was the easiest for

students to understand and make corrections, and therefore they tended to like

it best. It was also presumably the fastest way overall for the teacher to respond

when multiple drafts were involved. Underlining is a viable alternative, at least

for students who are advanced enough to do self-correction (we saw from the

first study that the students who made the fewest errors at the beginning

benefited the most from having their errors underlined and correcting them)

and for the kinds of errors they can self-correct.10 In the second study, it was

nearly as effective as Correction for improving accuracy on subsequent

writing. It could be argued that Underlining was effective only because some

students in the second study had previously received more explicit treatments,

but the experimental group in the first study was exposed only to Underlining

throughout the semester, and they also showed a significant increase in

accuracy. Underlining takes less teacher time on the first draft, and, more

importantly, students feel they are learning more when they are involved in

self-correction.

Therefore, the decision of which of these two methods to use should be made in

the context of the other goals of the course (e.g., whether writing or language is the

primary focus) and the amount of time one wants the students to devote to

grammatical and lexical error correction. Or, of course, one can use a combination

of Underlining for errors the students can self-correct and Correction for those they

cannot.11

What seems to be a crucial factor, as was shown in the first study, is having the

students do something with the error correction besides simply receiving it. When

students incorporate the feedback in revisions, even when receiving direct

correction from the teacher, error feedback on writing is a way to draw attention

to form without distracting students from their original communicative intent.

(It could in fact demonstrate to students the teacher’s commitment to helping them

express that intent.) Moreover, helping them notice a mismatch between their

interlanguage and the target language might well facilitate second language

acquisition. After the teacher either corrected the errors or underlined them

for student self-correction, subsequent student writing was both significantly

more correct, in just 10 weeks, and done significantly more quickly, with a slight

increase in the quality of the content.

10 After doing this research, I now have a better idea which errors those are, but that is a topic for

another study. The interaction between a student’s proficiency level and ability to self-correct is

another topic which needs further study.11 In a subsequent class, all students were satisfied with this combination method.


Acknowledgments

This research was supported by a teacher-research grant from the Massachu-

setts Association of Teachers to Speakers of Other Languages (MATSOL). The

author is also grateful for the comments of several reviewers and for the statistical

help of Terence Tivnan and Richard Palmer.

References

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