(This posting includes a handout which you are welcome to use with your students.)
Imagine that you read Mari’s essay in which she developed her ideas exactly the way that you had hoped she would. But her grammar was very weak and even caused some confusion. You are torn about what grade to give her. You know that her grammar skills are not strong enough to succeed at the next level, so you don’t want to mislead her. But you also don’t want to discourage her since her content was so good.
(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.
Reading every chance you get.
An international student, Emily, was really struggling with the grammar in her writing assignments. Even though she worked with a tutor, she was continuously making basic mistakes. In the fall, the program reluctantly promoted her to my higher-level Writing course. I found her to be the third lowest of 17 students in the class in being able to apply grammatical accuracy to written work. Ten weeks later, she was the second best. I was totally amazed!
At the end of the Fall term, she passed my class and then took English Comp (English 101) during the Winter term. She got an A.
I had a chance to talk to her about her remarkable turn-around. What she did is not beyond what other students can do. After that opportunity that I had to talk to her, every term, I share with all my students her story.
I’ll summarize what she had done below.
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.
Common Sense Teaching ESL 