(This posting includes a handout which you are welcome to use with your students.)*
Because this technique gives students a chance to discover their grammar errors, we have found students have greatly improved their self-editing skills. And self-editing skills will be of great value to them as move beyond ESL courses.
Here is a description of the technique along with a handout exercise that will introduce students to it.
Early in my career, I had a whisper conversation with two of my novice colleagues. We had often heard several of our other colleague lament the fact that they had just picked up a set of essays and would have to spend several hours marking them. To them, it seemed like drudgery, and they assumed all of us felt the same. In private, the two novice colleagues and I were a bit surprised and relieved to find that we actually enjoyed the process of marking our students essays and giving them feedback. We weren’t weird for feeling this way. Over 35 years later, I still find this a rewarding experience. One of the reasons is that it allows me an opportunity to experience flow.
A well-known research psychologist, Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi (he has humorously explained that his name is pronounced “chicks send me high”) has described this state as having several characteristics. Amazingly, in our job as ESL instructors, we often get to experience this.
Writing three drafts
An academic ESL writing instructor whom I was mentoring recently asked me how I dealt with the different drafts of essays. She was sure that students needed to write at least four or fives drafts, but she wasn’t sure how she should respond to each draft.
At some point in the writing process, the amount of time and energy that the students and instructor put into an essay outweighs the benefits. If our goal is to help students develop writing skills and to develop writing techniques, writing more than three drafts can be overkill. And “marking” more than one draft, can be a less-than-optimal use of time and energy by the instructor.
Common Sense Teaching ESL 