Teacher Editing, Part 2

Teacher editing happens in our ESL Young Writers writing workshops just before students prepare the final draft of their personal experience pieces. It is the last of several interventions we make in the students’ writing process. The first intervention is during rehearsal and the second is when students take their finished first drafts to a content conferencing group.

In content conferencing, authors read their work aloud for peer response. Listeners ask questions to resolve any confusion they sense and help authors realize changes that would make their second drafts more effective and clearer. To put everyone on the same playing field of ideas and organization, no one is allowed to comment about anyone’s English at this stage. There’s a real stigma in Sierra Leone about making mistakes in English, and we don’t tolerate such ridicule in our clubs.

It is the group’s responsibility help authors tell their stories clearly. A facilitator should be present in every content conference to make sure the students are asking “why” and “how” or “I didn’t understand” questions for discussion, rather than flinging out gotchas (What is your father’s name? How many doctors were in the hospital? What time was it?) Once the student discussion has petered out, the facilitator can ask any important questions that the students may not have thought of. The whole interactive process is an extremely important part of the language learning that goes on in the club.

I am coming around to the point made in Part 1, that facilitators feel too much pressure during teacher editing just before the final draft. In trying to edit both storytelling and written devices, they actually pay more attention to mechanical errors such as punctuation and capitalization. Therefore, I think we will move in our Young Writers clubs toward editing grammatical storytelling devices in our content conferences. Facilitators can raise one or two of the following discourse-level language points they hear a need for, and specify the place in the story where they heard this problem(s). The whole group would benefit from a discussion of these factors that affect their oral delivery:

o   Avoid repeating a noun you have recently mentioned—use a pronoun instead.

o   First use indefinite articles (some, a, a lot of) to refer to an unknown object or person; then use a definite article (the) to refer to it.

o   Use sequence-signaling words like later, ago, and before, as well as time expressions like at night and the next morning to make chronology clear.

o   Tell your story in the past tense, primarily.

o   Distinguish the meanings of but, so and and.

o   If you want to use a person’s name in the story, introduce it the first time that person is mentioned and then continue to use the name from then on.

Note that the list contains only discourse-level grammar strategies. They are the glue—the cohesion and coherence—that makes content and organization hang together.  That’s why they belong in a content conference.

Following the content conference, students go on to revision, or writing a second draft that incorporates their changes. Every second draft should go back to the group for a second content conference, to check that the revision happened. Only those Young Writers who have made good strides with revision should move on to self-, peer-, and then an easier teacher editing.