Chui/Savignon Feedback Article

It's tricky to prioritize focus areas when giving feedback to students, because accuracy and meaning are both so important when learning/teaching a language. A couple of interesting points by Zamel were brought up in this article, and the most interesting to me was the idea that many teachers look at a student's essay as complete once it's been edited, while in actually, the writing should be looked at as an ongoing piece of work. When I was an undergrad here at UIC, I had a professor named Tony Grosch, and the phrase he most emphasized with us is the notion that "writing is a process." A piece of writing was never complete, in his opinion, and he always encouraged us to treat our students' essays as an ongoing writing assignment that they always have room to improve.

Because there's so much for ESL students to grasp, I think this theory is an important one to employ. Students should tackle each aspect of the language as it comes, and giving them feedback on their written work will give them a tangible exercise that they can continuously work on.

I found it interesting that some people argue that error correction has no benefits. If students see and understand their errors, and have the chance (if need be ) to speak to the instructor to clarify, I don't see how they wouldn't improve their written language acquisition.

I do like the idea of giving feedback over the internet. I have done this many times with students, granted they weren't ESL students, but I found this a great way to give students extra opportunity to correct their work, and experiment using online resources.