Module Four Reflections

    The Way to Deal with Errors

       When I read Chapter Nine: Assignments: Outline, Student Texts Drive Them in Teaching Writing Online, I was impressed by some ideas in the introduction. For example, using many informal assignments is a function both of what the students are doing and of the way we look at and evaluate their work; because students write so much online, we can free ourselves from tendencies to focus on error in students’ writing (94). However, when assignments are important, we end up trying to find reasons to state the flaws as a way of justifying grades rather than working with student texts. So, as an OW teacher, in order to deal with students’ error properly, we should understand what errors can do in our evaluation, and how to evaluate students’ work.

       First, errors can be unprofitable intrusions upon the consciousness of the reader, influencing the clarity of students’ work. When we are reading students’ work, we can ignore it if there is few grammar mistakes and continue reading. However, if there are too many grammar mistakes, we can’t ignore them, and those mistakes become an obstacle in our reading process. As a result, those technical errors discourage our access to larger ideas of students’ work, shifting the reader’s attention from where he is going (meaning) to how he is getting there (code).      

       Second, errors can be a reflection of students’ logic map in writing. A closer look for students’ work will reveal very little that is random or “illogical” in what they have written. Writers never make mistakes out of no reason, which can be they haven’t learned the specific writing rules before, or they are influenced by their first language, and so on. I used to have a student, who always used wrong conjunctions in his writing. One time, I had a conversation with him, asking him about why he used some specific conjunctions, and he told me that because he saw other students used them as well. Until then, I realized that he used those conjunctions improperly because he didn’t understanding the meaning of them, only knowing how to spell them.

       Last but not least, what should we expect toward errors in students’ work? On the one hand, we need to decide the type of error. Normally, they can be divided into two types, which are sentence issue and global issue. If it is a sentence issue, it may lie in punctuation, syntax, spelling, and vocabulary. If it is global issue, it may lie in the structure, the content, or the theme. Global issue is the prior concern for teachers when evaluating students’ writing. When faced with global issue, we should ask students questions, and try to get them to talk, listening what they think about their writing. As for sentence issue, if there are too many, some type of specific instruction may need to be taken into account seriously.

On the other hand, the type of assignments have something to do with the evaluation. Small assignments should be used for the purpose of allowing students to work out on a minor scale what we've taught them, and large assignments are a culmination of how well they learned those things. For example, for a journal or post, we may not need to be too picky for we care more about students’ ideas. However, for a term paper or a test, we may concern about students’ grammar as well.

To sum up, students errors definite influence our expectation toward their writings. In order to help students get rid of errors, we should look closely at their work, rather to be certain to see nothing but a chaos of errors when encountering their writing. As students produce a variety of texts in the OW course, our job is to help them to explore and take productive risks to develop their writing, not being scared by errors.

Works Cited

Warnock, Scott. Teaching Writing Online. NCTE: Illinois. 2009. Print.