Research Progress Report

So far for my research paper I have looked into how to give a student the most effective written feedback so that they will help foster growth, progress, and confidence in our student writers.  I believe that I truly understand how to respond most effectively for L1 students, so I am beginning to take a closer look into how to respond to L2 students in order to give them the best feedback as I can.  I have also begun looking into genre-based approach like you have suggested, and began looking into Dana Ferris.

My overall research question is going to be something along the lines of whether teacher response and feedback for L2 student writers should be much like the response and feedback teachers should give L1 students, or if we need to approach L2 student writers completely differently.

Three articles that I have looked at are:

Gocsik, Karen. “Diagnosing and Responding to Student Writing.” Dartmouth Writing Program. Dartmouth College, 18 Dec. 2007. Web. 9 Sept. 2012.

This article shows teachers how to be effective responders and gives a variety of strategies to think about and implement when responding to student writing. She helps the teachers to get to know the student through writing and take who the student is into consideration upon reading the drafts of their work.

Greenhalgh, Anne M. “Voices in Response: A Postmodern Reading of Teacher Response.” College Composition and Communication 43.3 (1992): 401-410. Print.

This article discusses the task of advising students about their work-in-progress, and how a teacher must make it possible for a student to take control of their own writing, be a responsive reader, and yet avoid appropriating the draft by identifying and solving writing problems. This article emphasizes the role of the teacher as a reader and not an evaluator. This piece is different from any of the other articles that I found because it uses voice as a tool to understand teacher response.

Sullivan, Patrick. “Responding to Student Writing: The Consequences of Some Common Remarks.” English Journal 75.2 (1986): 51-53. Print.

The beginning portion of this article uses a commonly spoken quote “your ideas are good but…” as a set up for teachers to then speak their own thoughts about the students writing.  This article discusses how teachers console poor writers or how teachers immediately try to assist students in developing ideas and critical thinking. Furthermore, this article talks about how teachers set students up for a false sense of achievement, and make them less willing to accept criticism. Sullivan demonstrates how to praise ideas, and how to efficiently give students the teacher response they need by demonstrating exactly what they need to work on individually. The main point of this article is to help teachers learn how to critique student writing and how to offer instruction and suggestions for improvement by encouraging them to improve, and guiding them to how without developing students’ ideas for them.