Responding to Student Writing

I happen to be writing a paper over this topic this semester, and I'll be writing a thesis over it in the fall. I've done quite a bit of research for my paper and my thesis proposal, which I decided to share on this blog since the topic came up in 603 today. Below is a summary of the more important articles on responding to student papers (the paper I'm currently working on is in APA style, so forgive the formatting).

In “Responding to Student Writing,” (1982) Nancy Sommers discovered that “teachers’ comments can take students’ attention away from their own purposes in writing a particular text and focus that attention on the teachers’ purposes in commenting” (Sommers, p. 149) (original emphasis). In other words, teachers appropriate their students’ texts by directing students to focus on areas that the teacher — rather than the student — deems important. Sommers says this appropriation occurs most frequently when teachers comment extensively on grammar, word choice, and style in the first draft, which gives students an exaggerated idea of theses elements’ importance. She advocates a “scale of concerns” that weights comments on organization and logic more than comments on spelling and grammar (p. 151).

Most disastrously, teachers’ comments often give contradictory messages. Sommers provides a facsimile of a student paragraph in which the instructor has written “wordy” above multiple sentences and “This paragraph needs to be expanded” in the margin (p. 150). Such unclear contradiction could be a cause or a symptom of Sommers’s next finding, “that most teachers’ comments are not text-specific and could be interchanged, rubber-stamped, from text to text” (p. 152)(original emphasis). The students Sommers, Brannon, and Knoblauch interviewed all admitted great difficulty with interpreting their teachers’ vague directives. Rather than helping the students, comments such as “choose precise language” or “think more about your audience” transformed revising into “a guessing game” (Sommers, p. 153).

Vivian Zamel’s 1985 study of 15 ESL teachers' comments, “Responding to Student Writing,” asserts that “teachers respond to most writing as if it were a final draft, thus reinforcing an extremely constricted notion of composing” and “teachers’ marks and comments usually take the form of abstract and vague prescriptions and directives that students find difficult to interpret.” She adds, “Rarely was a question asked or a suggestion made that gave students real direction” (p. 92). When such comments did appear, however, it indicated that the instructor expected substantial revision rather than mere surface-level correctness.

Zamel concludes that vague commentary and abstractions should be replaced with “text-specific strategies, directions, guidelines, and recommendations” (p. 95). Second, there needs to be a scale of concerns or priorities in instructor comments and students’ revisions, with meaning-level issues coming first and foremost (p. 96). Finally, Zamel argues that instructors should respond to student writers (people) rather than student writing (product) (p. 97).

In “Across the Drafts” (2006), [not to be confused with "Between the Drafts"] Nancy Sommers reports and discusses the findings of a four-year longitudinal study of 400 Harvard students. Sommers claims that “most comments, unfortunately, do not move students forward as writers because they underwhelm or overwhelm them, going unread and unused. As one student suggested, ‘Too often comments are written to the paper, not to the student’” (p. 250). Furthermore, nearly 90% of the students in the study “urge faculty to give more specific comments” (p. 251). She concludes from the study that “feedback plays a leading role in undergraduate writing development when, but only when, students and teachers create a partnership through feedback—a transaction in which teachers engage with their students by treating them as apprentice scholars, offering honest critique paired with instruction” (p. 250). In addition, Sommers examines the role of the student, a topic that has been neglected in most professional literature. Even if instructors engage their students as “apprentice scholars,” the student must be willing “to accept and benefit from feedback, to see it as instruction, not merely judgment” (p. 253).

In “Recovering the Conversation: A Reponse to 'Responding to Student Writing' via 'Across the Drafts'” (2006), Carol Rutz agrees with Sommers’s assessment that virtually all scholarship on responding to student writing has neglected the student’s role, as well as the classroom or social context of instructor feedback. The problem, Rutz argues, is that previous studies have focused on textual analysis, which cannot answer questions about students’ reaction to comments, how classroom instruction influences students’ decisions about revising, why instructors comment on particular things, and so forth (p. 258). Rutz finds in her own study that “clear messages between teachers and students about how drafts will be read promote meaningful communication” (p. 261)(emphasis in original).

If anyone's curious: For my thesis, I plan to look at the length of comments, their directiveness, and the concomitant (un)helpfulness of said comments. I'm also going to consider students' personality types and language proficiency to determine which comments help which students the most or least. I plan to examine three sections each of Eng 100, 110, and graduate-level classes. So if anyone's intrigued and would like to have their students participate, please let me know.

Finally, if anyone is interested in more information on this topic, I can post the citations to several more good articles.

Rutz, C. (2006). Recovering the Conversation: A Reponse to 'Responding to Student Writing' via 'Across the Drafts'. College Composition and Communication , 257-62.

Sommers, N. (2006). Across the Drafts. College Composition and Communication , 248-57.

Sommers, N. (1982). Responding to Student Writing. College Composition and Communication , 148-156.

Zamel, V. (1985). Responding to Student Writing. TESOL Quarterly , 79-101.