Final Exam - and Error Correction

Next Friday and the following Monday are final exams. Wow - can the first term be almost over already??

My blogging has fallen way behind! It's not for lack of thinking of folks back home, nor of things to post - just feeling busy, I guess. I will try to catch up with things soon.

For today, rather than whine about the final exam (at least for now!) - I shall post some thoughts on...

Error Correction!

There is one and only one error correction method used at Yonsei:

Yes, errors are corrected for us in bright red ink. That's it. There's no highlighting, no hints about how to correct our own errors, no writing center where we can discuss our errors - we can study the errors or not as we will.

And I often find the will is lacking. The value of studying the errors is nowhere near as valuable as doing the writing itself. That's where the real learning takes place. The teacher will never know how many times I look up words in the dictionary, how many times I check over my writing before I hand it in, how long I think about what content to put in my sentences - the pride I feel each time I finish a writing assignment.

If the teacher could be beside me while I am writing, and help me see the errors as I put them on the page, that would be helpful. That's the time the brain would be receptive to the feedback. But getting the feedback the next day, after the brain has gone on to other things, is really too late.

By far the majority of errors are "careless" - that is, I know how to spell the word or apply the grammar, but when I am thinking of so many things at once, I still make a mistake with it. Several times, I have made an error, and the teacher has taken the trouble to write out the rule I broke. Each time I felt sorry for the teacher, because I already knew the rule. It was wasted time for the teacher and actually felt insulting to me, presuming ignorance I didn't have.

I understand the teacher's goal for me is to write without errors, just as it's my goal as a teacher with my students at SJCC. The student can't feel the irritation errors cause the native reader, so the teacher must do something about that. But I wonder if focusing on the student's errors is really the way to help students avoid them.

When I write, my goal as a student is different. I want to communicate. I want to function. I feel real satisfaction when I do those things. How much sympathy I now have for some of our students at SJCC who are new to the Roman alphabet and have tremendous spelling problems. On different days they may write the word "friend" as "fiend" or "frind" or freind" or... yet they actually have learned how to spell the word. It's just that ... to them, the word looks just fine any of those ways. They know how to use the word. They just want to tell the reader something about their friend and are willing to work hard at that - but not to look up and double check minutely every single word.

Would spelling lists help? Would charts of frequent grammar errors help? I 'm not convinced. Making charts of my stupidity doesn't really seem to be that inspiring! I'd rather use the time to read some more and listen some more and study some more. That, it seems to me, would be more fruitful, and lead to better writing in the long run.

I am feeling more enthusiastic about things like journal writing - writing activities where content, rather than correctness, is emphasized. It would not bother me at all to turn in some writing and have just my content - and not my errors - commented on by the teacher. It would be refreshing! And fun!

And that will be a topic for another time - can language learning be... fun???