Blog # 3 

Witbeck, Michael C. “Peer Correction Procedures for Intermediate and Advanced ESL Composition Lessons.” The TESOL Quarterly 10.3 (1976): 321-325 JSTOR. Web. 19 September, 2011

This week I found this article that I had retrieved last year in my collection of reference materials. Although it was written in the 1970's, the ideas and techniques introduced here are still new to me as an ESL/EFL teacher who has been in the US for barely more than a couple of years. The reason for picking this article is to learn how a class works when students are assigned to correct their fellow students' work in an ESL composition class. Instead of articles where writers and researchers focus on macro level challenges, I would rather select the content which is usually about the first hand narration and inspiration reflected by the teachers who are actually teaching in the classroom and facing challenges in their daily lives. That research was carried out at UCLA, but the demographic is not stated in the article.

The writer introduced methods for peer correction in the classroom to the teachers of ESL composition. He argues that peer correction is innovative and traditional teacher correction uninteresting, time consuming, and tiring.  Peer correction can enhance students' ability to edit and revise their papers. It will also facilitate the student-student and student-teacher oral communication. (What I would take advantage would be helping students with metalanguage skills which would later help students understand and use them to improve their future writings.) Mistakes are seen as part of process, not failures.

Witbeck proposes a set of procedures to cope with the problems that a teacher my encounter. One procedure is followed by another which could help the teacher overcome setbacks in the previous one. In the first procedure is the idea of making a selected essay visible for the students in the class. The selected essay is then corrected by the class as a whole. The disadvantage pointed out by the author is that there could be some overzealous students who dominate the class during the session. The second procedure is students correcting the papers finished by their classmates. Students are paired up and given two essays to do corrections, but unfinished papers are shared by students who have finished earlier so that time is spent efficiently. It also encourages students to get immediate feedback, which I think teachers cannot usually do during classroom hours.

The third approach is problem solving, which is the teacher giving students the task of finding particular mistakes or weaknesses the students should work on. It is, as suggested by the writer, better to pair up students according to their varying levels. Weak ones are often paired up with better students to help in the fourth approach. They are assigned to work individually and then they are put in groups or pairs to work together. It was proven to be productive by the writer.

The setback anticipated then was handwriting of the students. I hope this approach could be refined by using some Internet application where students can do corrections at home so that writing to learn becomes meaningful to student writers as part of the journal writing that I read last week. I hope to incorporate this approach to my future writing class as part of their journal writing with a few modifications.