Category Archives: • Giving Feedback on Writing Assignments

• Effective and Ineffective Praise of Students for Motivation

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(This article was originally published in MET (Modern English Teaching) in the March/April 2026 issue.)  MET website

I realize now that I probably had been making a mistake over the past decade of teaching, according to research.

In my Advanced ESL Writing course, every term, I usually had one or two outstanding writers. I wanted to compliment those students at the end of the course with the hope that it could motivate them and give them a positive attitude going forward. On those students’ final essays, I often wrote. “You are a talented writer.” That was not a good idea. I recently learned why, and also, what kinds of compliments would be better.

Research has shown that complimenting students “appropriately” can motivate them and can strengthen our relationship with them.  However, certain types of compliments can unintentionally cause pressure on them.

In one study, after 117 undergraduates took a verbal reasoning test, they received one of three types of written feedback:

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• I Stopped Trying to Catch AI Plagiarism. Here’s What I Do Instead.

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Dealing with students who plagiarize now seems like a piece of cake compared to ones who now use AI to write their papers. I could usually deter students from plagiarizing by demonstrating how easy it is for teachers to find it.

Early in a term, I would show this paragraph that may have been written by a student:

I’d ask them if they thought the writer had copied any of the sentences from a source. Unsurprisingly, they always spotted the last one. It was a clear signal: if a student can identify it, a teacher definitely can.

However, the rise of AI has shattered that approach.

Why the old technique doesn’t work anymore

Now, I can no long claim that it’s easy to find plagiarism using the sentence, “Aside from this caveat….” If a student plugged that into AI, it could come out as, “Even with this problem, I still think that learning the four skills together is the best way to study a foreign language.”

The vocabulary is simpler, the tone is conversational, and it is incredibly difficult to prove the student didn’t write it themselves.

According to reports from NPR and other outlets, many schools are spending thousands of dollars on AI-detection software. Yet, research shows these tools are far from reliable and frequently produce false positives. Few things are more discouraging for students than working hard on a paper and then being accused of not writing it themselves.

The “Incentive” Approach

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• A Case For Marking Every Mistake On Essays

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Lane was worried that her students would become discouraged if they saw a lot of mistakes marked on their papers. So to help them develop confidence in their writing skills, for the first essays that they turned in at the beginning of each term, she was very selective about which mistakes she marked. Thus, their first grades were all relatively high. Unfortunately, this approach had some less-than-desirable outcomes, not only for her students, but also for their teachers at the next level.

First of all, the message to the students was, “You don’t have to carefully edit—you can still get a good grade.”

Also, as the term progressed, she realized that several of the students were still making many mistakes, whether from poor editing and/or from lack of knowledge. At the end of the term, she had to decide to either fail those students, which would be a shock to them since they wouldn’t be expecting that, or pass them, which would be a burden for their next teacher, who would have to deal with students who didn’t have the skills necessary to be successful at that level.

A better approach has been to mark every mistake as long as the teacher is strategic when dealing with essays.

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• Writing class: Easy, focused, POSITVE feedback on essays. (REVISITED)

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victory

“Good style!”

Many instructors want to not only point out errors on students’ papers but also encourage them with positive comments about what they did well.  Unfortunately, it can take a lot of time writing out these comments with clear handwriting, and it involves mental energy trying to formulate what to say in a way that students can understand.

There is a method for indicating specifically what the student did well on any writing task, which takes little time on the part of the instructor and results in improved writing in the future.

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