Proofreading and Editing Strategies for EAL Students
- Julia Lippold
- Feb 22, 2019
- 5 min read
Blog Post 1.2
22.02.2019
How to Teach EAL Students About the Importance of Proofreading and Editing their Written Texts
Welcome back everyone. Thank you again for supporting my blog and I hope you have had a positive and productive start to the year/term.
This is my thirteenth year teaching middle years EAL and I feel as though I am continually honing my courses by focussing even more on the importance of proofreading and editing with my students.
Since I started teaching EAL, correction and marking has always perplexed me. How much of a student’s work should I correct? How much guidance do I provide a student when it comes to proofreading and editing? How, in fact, do I teach a student to proofread and edit their work when they’re still grappling with the foundations of English syntax and its structure?
The answers to these questions are multifaceted. Many of my EAL teaching colleagues have worked on this essential part of EAL teaching in both the New Arrivals and mainstream settings; and the one constancy that I have noted is that EAL students need to be taught explicitly how to proofread and correct their own written work rather than the teacher doing all the hard work. When I was a graduate teacher, a colleague once told me that in a classroom, “The one who is doing the thinking is doing the learning.” I have never forgotten this maxim and I believe this is extremely relevant when it comes to editing and proofreading.
One of the four key aims of the Victorian Curriculum F-10 for English is that students “understand how Standard Australian English works” (emphasis added). For this to occur, I firmly believe that an EAL student needs to be given the tools to rework and draft written texts with explicit teacher feedback and correction that supports the student to make requisite changes and improvements themselves.
If you are teaching the VCE Bridging EAL course you will also be cognisant that ‘English for Everyday and Academic Purposes’ is a mandatory Area of Study for Unit 1 of the course (it is also an option for Unit 2 with added emphasis on syntactical awareness of English). Specifically, one of the key areas of knowledge in this Area of Study is “the process of planning, drafting, revising, editing and proofreading written work.”
GET IN THE EXPERTS
This year I decided to commence my unit on ‘English for Everyday and Academic Purposes’ by inviting in an expert to speak to my year 10 EAL class about the importance of good grammar as a life skill and some practical proofreading and editing strategies. I am fortunate that a very dear family friend of mine is an editor and journalist who has her own writing school which focusses on teaching good grammar and editing skills. Penny Modra, Editorial Director at ‘The Good Copy’ came to talk to my class last week and I all can say is, I wish I had thought of doing this years ago.
My students wrote Penny questions in advance and she was able to target her presentation to respond to these burning uncertainties. Some of the questions included:
1. How do you proofread your work to ensure there are no mistakes left? Are there any specific recommended ways to do it?
2. How can we write in a more concise way?
3. What should we focus on while proofreading?
4. What are some clauses and sentence structures we can use to make our language more formal or clearer?
5. What is the difference between a colon and a semi-colon?
6. How long should proofreading take in test conditions?
Penny also showed students some examples of bad grammar (such as poorly written signage) to illustrate why good grammar is important in conveying meaning to the reader.
USE A CORRECTION CODE
The main editing strategy I use my students is a ‘correction code’. Many of you may already be using one of these, or a variation. A simple google search will reveal a plethora of options so you do not need to go to the trouble of crafting your own from scratch. Here are some I found:
I have been using the same correction code since I was a graduate teacher. This was generously provided to me by my Curriculum Coordinator; my colleagues and I all used the same code to ensure consistency across classes. If you are a team leader or coordinator, I would encourage you to consider using a uniform correction code across your EAL classes to assist in raising awareness about the importance of teaching EAL students self-correction strategies also so that students only need to learn to use one code. Even better, find out if your school has a Style Manual and/or correction code that is used across domains.
Why do I use a correction code? This is because I am a firm believer in empowering EAL students to gain a strong awareness of how the English language is structured and there is simply no use in me marking up their work with all the corrections as this will effectively teach them nothing.
If a student is guided in the right direction though, knowing what type of error they have made this empowers them to first consider the type of error they have made (syntactical, punctuation, spelling etc.) and attempt to rectify it themselves.
You will need to allocate time to teach students how to understand your chosen correction code and allow students time in class to correct their work with your support. Another way you can encourage proofreading and editing is to set up correction conferences.
CORRECTION CONFERECNING
I use ‘correction conferencing’ with all of my EAL students from years 7-12 and I find that the benefits of this structure are invaluable. Firstly, I group my class into small groups (preferably 3’s or 2’s). I make the groups too, often pairing or grouping a more competent student with a weaker student.
Once I have proofread a writing task and returned it to my class, I ask them to get into their correction conference groups and read each other’s texts. Using their proofreading checklists, each student reads another students’ text aloud and provides structured feedback to the student. By reading the text aloud, EAL students can usually hear inaccuracies better than they can identify them from solely reading the text and also practice their pronunciation at the same time. This is a strategy I encourage students to employ when they are alone as well.
Feedback can be given to their peers in a variety of way’s. I ask my students to use formative assessment guru, Dylan William’s, What Went Well (WWW) and Even Better If (EBI) initialisms as a guide for their feedback and peer-assessment. This way, there is a focus on the positive aspects of a students’ writing and encouragement on how they can improve the text rather than just identifying all of the mistakes or weaknesses.
PROOFREADING CHECKLIST
Finally, I encourage my students to use a proofreading checklist upon completing their writing and prior to submitting it to the teacher. Each student is given a copy of the checklist and I ask them to glue it into the writing sections of their folders. The checklist guides students to look at specific elements of their text, check for any repetition and consider the text’s overall flow.
I have shared a copy of my checklist on the resources section of my website.
A combination of the above-mentioned proofreading and editing strategies should guide students to make informed decisions about their written texts and most importantly, empower them to make their own improvements to their texts.
Thank you for following and sharing these blog posts with your colleagues. Thank you also for your feedback in terms of emails, messages and face-to-face.
Happy teaching!
Julia
References:
https://www.theage.com.au/national/writing-proper-english-let-s-call-it-an-act-of-resistance-20190210-p50wuk.html
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