In the past couple of years, I’ve experimented with a new approach, and I finally feel like I’ve hit upon something which works.
In the Cambridge DELTA exam, Paper One Task Five, you have to look at a piece of learner-produced writing or speaking, identify 3 strengths and 3 weaknesses of the text, providing an example for each, then choose one weakness to prioritise for follow-up work. My new method is inspired by this approach of prioritizing areas. Both my intermediate teen and upper intermediate adult students seem to have responded well to it.
At our school, we mark higher-level work out of twenty, with five marks each for content, target reader (including genre and formality), accuracy and range of language. Recently I have started putting together criteria for each area and going through these with students before they do any work which will be assessed. Here is an example for a report to be written by upper intermediate students.
I take several passes at each piece of writing I mark, using a system a little like this:
- Read first for a general impression, to give a target reader mark.
- Next, put a tick in the left-hand margin for each point students have made. Compare these points against the rubric. Use this to give a content mark, with the highest mark going to students who have sufficiently expanded on all of their ideas.
- Tick any particularly effective phrasing within the text, as well as any language which you know the student is experimenting with even if they haven’t got it quite right. This contributes to the range mark.
- Underline/draw arrows for any mistakes students have made. Don’t correct it yet!
- Once you have an overview of all of the mistakes, choose three priority areas, for example spellings, missing words, and prepositions, or wrong words, word forms, and subject-verb agreement. For each area, choose a highlighter colour, and highlight all of the relevant mistakes.
- Correct anything else. This is also when I rephrase anything which I think the student could have expressed differently.
- Write a comment for the student, including clear information about what they could do to improve their mark in each area. When you write about accuracy, include a list of the three areas that you have prioritized, and highlight them in the relevant colours.
- Give the work back to your student and ask them to correct the highlighted errors.
- Make sure you get it back from them (!) and look at it a second time.
- This time when you give it back, go through any errors the student was unable to correct.
You can see an excerpt from one of these pieces of writing here. And here is my comment on the work:
Since I started to mark work in this way, I have found that students are much more likely to engage with my corrections, and to ask about how to improve their writing in general. They also seem more likely to implement the corrections from one piece of work to the next. Most importantly, it doesn’t take much longer than any system I used before: only 10-15 minutes per text, depending on the handwriting!
How do you mark your students' writing? Do you use a similar approach? Does the system Sandy describes sound like something that would work well for you?