Week 13 Reading reflection

This week's reading continues to deal with the issue of Teaching Writing, with more focus on how to go about designing an effective writing course.

Among the issues that second language teachers need to take into consideration when it comes to developing a writing curriculum, i am particularly interested in teacher's response to students' writing, including giving feedback and correcting errors. One of the reasons why this issue captures my attention is because during my process of learning English writing, i've encountered one incidence in which the teacher collects students' papers and returns them graded, but with no major correction or feedback to indicate how good/bad the students are doing. As mentioned in the book, teacher feedback is essential to students' improvement in learning writing and can come under written or oral form. Based on students' linguistic backgrounds and preferences, teachers can choose the feedback type that works best for their students. According to my experience as a second language writer, feedback that is worded under the form of a suggestion or question rather than direct indication of errors seem to work best for me, since they drive me to get back to my paper and try to figure out how i can improve my writing by answering the teacher's questions or following his/her suggestions. Also, in my opinion, the most important and also one of the hardest thing for teachers to achieve is to make sure their feedback has some sort of influence on students' performance. This can be done by making students produce several drafts before the final products, and the teacher makes sure that teacher or peer feedback is given to each draft.