The Use Of Corrections And Peer Correction In Learning Writing

From the results collected from survey questionnaires, both teachers and students regarded error correction as an effective technique to improve students’ writing skill as well as limit their grammatical errors. Most of them appreciate the important role of error correction in learning writing. When the respondents were required to choose the most useful way to improve students’ writing proficiency, both of them chose teacher correction and peer correction as the most efficient methods. Students recognized the value of teacher correction, which its percentage made up the highest rate as opposed to the remaining error correction techniques, namely self-correction, peer correction and remedial work. Besides, a large number of the mentioned participants

Teachers having wide knowledge and experience as well as deep understanding of grammatical errors can use standardized methods to indicate students’ errors in writing correctly and clearly. Should they underline errors made by English learners, followed by giving more explanations and suggesting how to correct errors, students could know what kind of error they have made exactly to avoid them in the next writing. Besides noting down errors corrected directly, teachers can use error codes to describe the types of errors and give some recommendations to instruct how errors can be corrected. For example, VT is an abbreviation for verb tense or RO is the symbol of run-on sentence and so on. Noteworthy, it is necessary for students to have a certain understanding of the error codes so that they will know what teachers indicate. After that, they could realize what grammatical structures they should revise. In addition, after correcting errors, teachers should write down some compliments or advice to students, which is a considerable activity to create interaction between teachers and students. It can be revealed that teachers’ positive feedbacks like “Good” or specific recommendation such as “Linking words”, “Should write concluding sentence clearly” are truly beneficial to raise students’ motivation for avoidance of errors in their next written work and writing

It is carried out in three main forms, namely pair work, group work and whole class correction. This kind of method is an effective technique for error correction, which benefits both teachers and students. Firstly, most students appreciate the effectiveness of peer correction. During the process of error correction, students are interested in getting involved in working with their classmates. This is because no score is involved and they can freely share their own ideas. Cooperating with their fellows not only helps students increase their critical thinking, but also broaden their knowledge. In more details, a cooperative environment brings them a great opportunity to deliberate about their own errors and what the best error correction is. Moreover, not only do they learn from their own errors to avoid in the next writing, but they can also study a lot from their classmates’ errors. After that, the writers can indicate their strength and weakness to ameliorate their written work. Secondly, in terms of advantages for teachers, they can save a great deal of time in correcting errors for conveying other essential knowledge. After collecting students’ peer correction, the most common errors will be collected and then discussed with the whole class. This activity not only creates an interactive environment between teachers and students, but also assists