Sommers - Responding to Student Writing
Summary
At the beginning of the lecture Sommer says, “Commenting on student writing is the most widely used method for responding to student writing, it is the least understood (148).” Sommer continues talking about what is it to comment on student papers, and he explains why teachers do this, “We comment on student writing to dramatize the presence of a reader, to help our students to become that questioning reader themselves, because, ultimately, we believe that becoming such a reader will help them to evaluate what they have written and develop control over their writing (148).” When she continues reflecting on how the comments that the teachers write on the papers should be,and she said, “Comments create the motive for doing something different in the next draft; thoughtful comments create the motive for revising (149).” Sommer and other colleagues worked on a research in New York with teachers and students with the purpose of finding out what message are the teachers giving their students with their comments, and this is what they found first, “Teachers' comments can take students' attention away from their own purposes in writing a particular text and focus that attention on the teachers' purpose in commenting (149).” After analyzing a paragraph Sommer said that confusion in students is again aroused, “Students are commanded to edit and develop at the same time; the remarkable contradiction of developing a paragraph after editing the sentences (151).” In the research that Sommer and her colleagues were doing they found another interesting fact which is, “Most teachers' comments are not text-specific and could be interchanged, rubber-stamped, from text to text (152).”Sommer and her colleagues research summary is, “Teachers do not respond to student writing with the kind of thoughtful commentary which will help students to engage with the issues they are writing about or which will help them think about their purposes and goals in writing a specific text (154).” Sommer offers an alternative for the teachers, “Instead of finding errors or showing students how to patch up parts of their texts, we need to sabotage our students' conviction that the drafts they have written are complete and coherent. Our comments need to offer students revision tasks of a different order of complexity and sophistication (154).” Sommer gives the teachers the key to success for their comments, “The key to successful commenting is to have what is said in the comments and what is done in the classroom mutually reinforce and enrich each other (155).” To finalize she said that teachers have a challenge which is, “Develop comments which will provide an inherent reason for students to revise; it is a sense of revision as discovery, as a repeated process of beginning again, as starting out new, that our students have not learned (156).” |
Synthesis
Responding to the Student Writing was written by Nancy Sommer. It first begins saying that most teacher comment on their student papers although most students get confused with this. The text is about common mistakes the teachers make when commenting an essay of a student. It says that teachers with their comments tells the student which errors need to be edited and revised, but they forget that they are not evaluate how well they express their ideas, teachers are only correcting grammatically. This is true, when you receive a paper corrected by your teacher what you most frequently see is that you have a run-on sentence or that you are missing a punctuation mark here or you did not spell something right. This type of comments does confuse the majority of the students and makes them forget about the topic in which they are writing, because they are concentrating in grammatically errors. It was great that Sommer and her colleagues did a research and found out that it is very important for teacher to be careful with their comments. I think that at the end of the lecture Sommer gave detail about an important detail as a challenge, “Develop comments which will provide an inherent reason for students to revise; it is a sense of revision as discovery, as a repeated process of beginning again, as starting out new, that our students have not learned (156).” This point made by Sommer will make the teacher and student work as a team and the results will be better. |