Responding to a Students writing
Teachers have being trained to
evaluate readings, literature items, etc., yet most teachers suggest that a minimum of
time was given to enforce revising skills on student’s works therefore,
revision might be a contradicting issue that can lead the student to states of confusion
when editing their drafts. Nancy Somers, along with her colleges, have run a
series of experiments with subjects such as teachers, students, and machines,
in order to set apart the differences and opinion of these subjects on revising
and editing a paper. Overall most of the students comment that a teacher’s
comments and editions on papers sometime contradict them therefore they are
left with a grammar-edited paper that threw the student off their main purpose
on writing it and their motives. According to Nancy Somers, being a teacher
herself, revising may be somewhat stressing due to the mass amount of time a
teacher has to invest on editing. However,
the stress does not count as a reason for why the editing might not be concrete
and clear. Teachers look at a student’s paper and starts editing grammar, punctuation,
spelling, sentence structures in order to give the student an example of how language
SHOULD work in their papers, but then again other comments suggest that
explanation, elaboration, and examples should be included. Apart from all the
editing, students focus on following the teacher’s suggestion rather than
applying strategies themselves to make the paper stand out. Nancy Somers has
realized that teachers follow a set of rules rather than providing the student
with examples, or advice. The teacher therefore gives the student short
comments that are open ended to the student such as “be more elaborative”, “explain”,
“what do you mean here”, or “avoid this”. The student is left dazed because no
specific advice or revision was made therefore the student thinks that their
drafts are completed when in fact the feedback was weak and negative. Nancy
Somers expresses her thoughts on revising by mentioning that teachers should
provide the student with literacy techniques, or writing strategies that will
make the student focus on what they want to say while they apply the corrections
and carry them as a template store in their heads.
