A dialogue journal aims to show how it can support a reflective, interactive classroom, which is rewarding for both teacher and students. Its value in terms of assessment is that it provides unassisted, unedited samples of student writing and reading comprehension as students become more and more able to read and respond fluently to the teacher’s entries. Kreeft, Jay and Staton, 1993). Incidentally, this shows that reading cannot be disassociated from writing that a link really exists between these two skills.
6. Response to Students Writing In responsive teaching, the student acts and the teacher reacts. The range of reaction is extensive and diverse because an individual teacher is responding to an individual student, and the student in turn is passing through an ever-changing process of discovery through writing. (Murray, 1985)
How do language teachers respond to their students’ written composition? Most teachers cannot resist correction the errors both global and local in their students’ compositions. Generally in the case of global errors (errors that impede communication), teachers substitute their own words, sentences, and even ideas for their students’ errors so that (as I mentioned earlier on) these students’ lose the ownership of their writing. They can barely recognize their work. This is contributory to many students’ dislike of writing.
Responding to students’ writing, if done properly, may lead to students improved written work and may make writing interesting, challenging and enjoyable.
Responding or feedback to writing can be both oral and written. There are a variety of response types that an English teacher can utilize in the classroom. In alternative forms of assessment, I emphasized portfolio assessment; in response to student writing which comprises the other half of my paper, I will zero in on conferencing – but first, let us see what other responses are.
1. Self-response
Self-response and assessment of one’s own writing or feedback is possible. Studies on self-assessment reveal that students are capable of analyzing and responding to their own writing given the proper training. By allowing students to react to their own work and to practice self-feedback, the teacher is encouraging them to be self-sufficient and independent. How can self-assessment be done? A few sample questions can be given as guidelines to the students such as :
+ What am I writing about? (s.m.)
+ Is the main idea of my work clear?
+ Do I have details, e.g. example and illustrations to support my main idea? Etc.
Many teachers are interested in having students able to do self-assessment and understand how they are developing as literary learners.
2. Peer Response.
Peer response show that readership does not belong exclusively to the teacher since in this type of response, students are enjoined to share their writings with each other. Students may not like this at the beginning but with the teacher’s encouragement, they will gradually get used to the idea of communicating their ideas to each other. Elbow, (198) believes that when the students write only for their teacher (which usually means for a grade) they often fall into certain bad habits, treating writing as an empty school exercise and attempting simply to just “get it right” or “give teacher what they want.” When students write for their peers, they become very concerned about what they say and how they say it. Students may not be as skilled as teachers responding to each other’s work but they are excellent in providing the one thing that writers need most – an audience.
Kroll (1991) says that because ESL students lack the language competence of native speakers of English who can react instructively to their classmates’ papers, peer responding in the ESL classroom must be modeled, taught and controlled for it to valuable activity. Controlling peer response is just like self-feedback, can be done through the use of a checklist. Below are the typical questions for peer response :
+ “What is the main purpose of this paper?”
+ “What have you found particularly effective in this paper?”
+ “Do you think the writer has followed through on what the paper set out to do?”
+ “Find three places in the essays where you can think of questions that have been answered by the writer. Write those questions on the margin as areas for the writer to answer in the next draft”.
3. Teacher response.
The last to respond to a written work is the teacher. The teacher’s load is lightened when students have done both individual and peer feedback. Gradually, the teacher can introduce peer correction so that students can be used to it. If individual and peer correction and feedback fail at first, the teacher can sometimes help by focusing attention on the place where the mistakes occur.
4. Conferencing : A one-to-one conversation.
Conferencing is a form of oral teacher feedback. A short conference of 10 to 15 minutes will enable the teacher to ask the student about certain arts of the latter’s writing which are problematic, but conferencing may be as short as 30 seconds, or as long as the two parties wish to talk. All the forms have the same essential feature : only two parties, a teacher and a student, not a teacher and a class. The conversation between these two parties is the strength of the conference method. Conferences make better acquainted with students.
According to Kroll (1991), conferences allow the teacher to cover potential misunderstandings that the student might have about prior written feedback on issues in writing that have been discussed in class. Furthermore, in conferencing students can usually learn more than they can when attempting to decipher teacher-written commentary on their own.
Meeting individually with students is one of the most valuable services a teacher can perform. In the context of assessment and response to student writing one-on-one conferences round out the process of discovering the needs of students, especially the first conference. Sommer (1989) further suggests that, the teacher should arrange to meet with students one-on-one after the latter have completed writing samples.
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