Commentary Tues, September 4th, 2007 (Y. Watanabe)

We started off by talking about the importance of footnote chasing while reading the articles. Footnote chasing is a research strategy to locate key resources on a topic by searching the reference sections of a paper. It will be easier to retrieve relevant literature for your own study, if you flag footnote chased articles and make notes. From my experience conducting meta-analysis, I would also recommend making notes and keywords in the Endnote software. Accumulation of those notes and keywords in the Endnote makes graduate students’ life much easier when it comes to writing a literature review. So far, each classmate has reviewed two articles. Among the reviewed articles, we were cautioned not to cite Frank Morris’s work.

For the rest of the class, we were engaged in mini error correction task. We first listed types of teacher written feedback on students’ writing and the types of error analysis in research. The following categories were identified.

Teacher

Types of feedback:

1. direct feedback (making correction with/without explanation)
2. indirect feedback (marking the location and/or type/nature of the error, clarification request)
3. metalinguistic feedback (explanation of the error)

Modes and manner of feedback:

1. conferencing, peer response
2. paper vs. electronic

Researcher

- Overall accuracy (nature of the error, all error noteworthy of focus)

- Specific error:

• article
  
• verb morphology (tense, aspect, subject agreement)
• preposition

The class was divided into six groups taking the role either as a teacher (direct FB and indirect FB group) or as a researcher (overall accuracy, article error, verb morphology error, and preposition error group) to analyze the error of a students’ writing sample. In a group, we identified errors and discussed the difficulty of providing or analyzing the errors. Summarized below are the key takeaways from the discussion:

Teacher difficulty from direct group:

1. It’s difficult as a teacher to provide feedback without knowing what stage of draft the writing is, the learning objectives, and learners’ proficiency and background.
2. Form vs. content
   - Making a distinction between lexical and grammar error.
   - Distinguishing local versus global error.
3. Different teachers focused on different errors (very erratic).

Teacher difficulty from indirect group:

1. Knowledge about the content of the writing (e.g., history in our writing sample) may be needed to accurately identify verb tense errors (e.g., past perfect). Especially personal narratives will be difficult to correct. Making corrections may change the content. Sometimes we need to ask clarification questions instead of direct correction.
2. Uniformity of coding. People use different coding system.

Researcher difficulties

1. Where does the error begin and end?
2. How can you clearly classify errors? (difficulty of form versus content)
3. It’s difficult to determine what the nature of the error is. What do you do with idiomatic errors that are grammatically correct?
4. It will be hard to determine the overall accuracy for intermediate level students’ writing. As the learners’ sentences become more complex, the more difficult to define what the nature of the error is.

Through the mini-error correction task, I learned how difficult and time consuming it is as a teacher or as a researcher to truly understand the linguistic (local) error of students’ writing. I am curious about the decision making process of teachers and researchers’ error identification and classification.

For next Tuesday:

Read Truscott (1999) and Lyster et al.’s (1999) commentary.

Reminder for next Tuesday:

“Verb morphology error group” needs to give a short summary on the tense errors (past perfect).