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Responding to Student Writing
Abstract
Because writing teachers invest so much time responding to student writing and because these responses reveal the assumptions teachers hold about writing, L1 writing researchers have investigated how composition teachers respond to their students' texts. These investigations have revealed that teachers respond to most writing as if it were a final draft, thus reinforcing an extremely constricted notion of composing. Their comments often reflect the application of a single ideal standard rather than criteria that take into account how composing constraints can affect writing performance. Furthermore, teachers' marks and comments usually take the form of abstract and vague prescriptions and directives that students find difficult to interpret. A study was undertaken to examine ESL teachers' responses to student writing. The findings suggest that ESL composition teachers make similar types of comments and are even more concerned with language-specific errors and problems. The marks and comments are often confusing, arbitrary, and inaccessible. In addition, ESL teachers, like their native-language counterparts, rarely seem to expect students to revise the text beyond the surface level. Such responses to texts give students a very limited and limiting notion of writing, for they fail to provide students with the understanding that writing involves producing a text that evolves over time. Teachers therefore need to develop more appropriate responses for commenting on student writin…
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In the citing paper
“Research has found that L2 writing teachers tend to pay more attention to formal correctness than to the discourse level of writing (Zamel, 1985)”
From Error Correction in the L2 Writing Classroom: What Do Students Think? (2005) · cites this paper as Zamel, 1985
In the citing paper
“Other studies have also found that ESL teachers tend to focus on the sentence level when responding to students' writing (Cohen, 1987; Zamel, 1985).”
From Error Correction in the L2 Writing Classroom: What Do Students Think? (2005) · cites this paper as Zamel, 1985
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“Zamel (1985) states that exposing the students with grammatical feedback only is not enough, there is a need for more content-based feedback.”
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Metadata
- Authors
- Zamel, V.
- Affiliations
- University of Massachusetts Boston (US)
- Corresponding author
- Zamel, Vivian
- Venue
- TESOL Quarterly
- Publisher
- JSTOR
- Published
- 1985-03
- Volume
- 19
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- 79
- ISSN
- 0039-8322 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W2069741599
- Cited by
- 763
- References
- 0
- Citations by year
- 2026: 6 · 2025: 7 · 2024: 11 · 2023: 17 · 2022: 16 · 2021: 32 · 2020: 35 · 2019: 31 · 2018: 35 · 2017: 24 · 2016: 31 · 2015: 43 · 2014: 43 · 2013: 33 · 2012: 43
- FWCI
- 72.24
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- TESOL Quarterly (publishedVersion)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › Language and Linguistics › EFL/ESL Teaching and Learning
- Social Sciences › Education › Student Assessment and Feedback
- Social Sciences › Linguistics and Language › Discourse Analysis in Language Studies
- Keywords
- writing revision, student perceptions of feedback
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