Blog #7 Writing Correction/Feedback

I thought the Savignon and Chiu article had a lot of good ideas. Most of them could be done with paper as well as online, but were beneficial either way. One idea I thought was particularly helpful and specific to online was the idea of having the students change the highlighted portion to a different color. I know when I was learning a foreign language I would only correct about 95% of the revisions. There were always some that I left, usually because I didn't understand and didn't want to put the effort into figuring it out. I know this sounds slack, but I don't think it's totally uncommon. If I would have had to turn in the next draft with a visual representation pointing to the areas I didn't revise, I would have worked harder to fix everything. As far as which to revise first, form or content, I do think it makes the most sense to focus on content first. In addition to the evidence showing that students do more revisions when content is focused on first, there is also just the practical side of it. If you have a student fix all their content first and then look at their grammar, they only have to revise each portion once. If you have them fix their grammar mistakes though, they are only going to have new ones after they've revised their content. I feel like they would end up doing grammar, and then content, and then grammar again.