Effective Use of Marking Symbols: A Two-Stage Solution

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As ESL/EFL teachers, providing constructive feedback is crucial for our students’ language development. One common, effective way to offer feedback is through the use of marking symbols. This not only pinpoints areas for improvement but also encouragse learner autonomy and self-correction.

Addressing Issues

However, there are issues with using marking symbols.

  1. Often, students fail to correct their work or overlook feedback altogether. Or, at least, I imagine they do, as few give back the writing for a second reading. I don’t think there’s much that can be done about this. It’s really up to the student how much time and effort they invest in their studies, all we can do is give them the tools.
  2. Seeing your work covered in symbols highlighting errors can be extremely demoralizing. This is where ‘Two-Stage Marking’ comes in.

Solution: Two-Stage Marking

To address the issue of demoralization and promote a growth mindset, I’m beginning to adopt a two-stage approach to marking writing. In the first stage, I highlight the strengths and positive aspects of the student’s writing. This helps learners recognize their accomplishments, building confidence. In the second stage, I address errors and areas for improvement.

To implement the two-stage marking approach effectively, I think it’s best to use two documents, the first highlighting positives. Encouraging students to reflect on positive feedback before addressing errors, emphasizes the progress they’ve made. This helps create a supportive feedback environment where students feel comfortable seeking clarification and asking questions.

Selecting Errors to Highlight

When selecting errors to highlight, it’s important to prioritize those that are most critical for each student’s progress. This targeted approach ensures that students focus on areas that will have the greatest impact on their language development. Highlighting positives, should help students understand that areas left unaddressed may still require attention.

Different Levels and Contexts

Marking symbols are versatile and applicable across various proficiency levels and learning contexts. However, I think they are used to best effect for exam students, to highlight the types of mistake they most often make and what to check carefully when proofreading their texts in exam conditions.

Below is a list of symbols I use for levels B1 and above and the exercise I do in class to introduce the symbols.

Highlighting the positives

Highlighting errors

 

CPD: How to Teach IELTS

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I’ve been teaching IELTS for years but feel that a lot of my material has grown stale. Also I’m increasingly asked to take on IELTS students of lower levels, but most of my current materials cater to those aiming for a 6.5 and above.

There are a lot of teaching IELTS courses out there currently. I chose the International House courses because International House is a well-established training provider. I was also under the misapprehension that having taken one International House course within the past year, I would qualify for a discount (it turns out International House London and International House World consider themselves to be different institutions as far as the discount is concerned).

I chose to take courses in all 4 skills for which you do receive a discount if booked together, the drawback being that you need to book and pay for all the courses before you’ve tried one.

Cost

These are expensive courses.

Format

These are asynchronous online courses. You have a week to complete each module before the next opens. Some tutors are strict about not allowing submissions or comments on previous modules once a new module starts. There is one tutor per course, the tutor is likely to change with each skill.

Participants

I’m not sure how many participants were in each course. Some were really good about commenting on the forum threads and sharing ideas, experience and observations, others didn’t comment until the last minute when it was made clear that not commenting would lead to not passing. This meant that the sharing of ideas was quite limited.

Tutors

I felt the tutors were engaged and knowledgeable. I was particularly impressed with their efforts to give enthusiastic and constructive feedback to each student, regardless of whether the point was a good one or had been made many times previously

Highlights

I felt I learned a lot about giving positive feedback. There were a couple of people who were really engaged and shared some valuable insights. One of the tutors was especially good, sharing up-to-date research and experience.

Quibbles

I feel too much relied on the knowledge and participation of other participants. Your experience seems to very much depend on your cohort.

I also think each course could offer more, and more concrete, ideas and activities.If the courses included downloadable material – workbooks, activities, and, perhaps, example lesson plans (much in the way the British Council does in their free courses) the courses would offer more value for money.

A lot of issues of participation, I think, could be solved if students were divided into smaller working groups.

If the course created smaller study groups and encouraged students to meet online at convenient times to discuss issues or even work together on producing or adapting materials for classroom use (to create a store of downloadable materials to share, perhaps), I think the courses would be much more effective.

Conclusion

Maybe I wasn’t the kind of student this course was designed for. However, I have taken other courses recently aimed at less experienced teachers and have found a lot that is useful. There were some ideas here I found interesting (I’m just don’t think there was enough to justify the cost).

If you had an enthusiastic cohort, your experience could be completely different to mine.

If you do find a good teaching IELTS course, let me know!

 

Vocabulary Profiling 2

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Have a look at ‘Vocabulary Profiling 1‘ for reasons to profile vocabulary.

LexTutor is a little less user-friendly than VocabKitchen (you may not want students to try it themselves) but offers some additional features.

One of these gives you the Type-Token Ratio (TTR) of your text. This is the number of word types against the number of word tokens. If you have the word ‘the’ 12 times in a text, that’s 12 tokens, but 1 type. The TTR indicates lexical variation (the higher the number, the more varied the vocabulary). When I did my first degree we had to count each word and each type and calculate this ourselves (I like LexTutor!).

Another feature LexTutor offers is calculating the Lexical Density of a text. This is the number of content words as opposed to function words in a text. The higher the Lexical Density, the more complex the language.

LexTutor also allows you to check your text against different corpora than VocabKitchen. As well as the Academic Word List (AWL), you can check against the BNC-COCA (which is similar to the CEFR in VocabKitchen).

 

Vocabulary Profiling 1

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How do you decide on the vocabulary to teach students?
 
Which vocabulary in a given text would you want students to learn and which items could you just gloss?
 
If you use a course book, you probably don’t really think about this but if you’re adapting resources (either authentic materials or changing the level of ELT materials), these are important questions.
 
Usually, I think it’s a mixture of experience and guesswork. And, arguably, for general EFL classes that’s fine.
 
But, how do you choose the vocabulary you will focus on if you’re teaching courses in specialist subjects you don’t have as much experience in?
 
What if you want to prove to your students that those particular vocabulary items are useful?
 
What if you want students to be able to assess their own use of vocabulary in written work, in terms of level?
 
Vocabulary Profiling is the answer!
 
I’ve just discovered (through the CertPT in EAP) VocabKitchen and LexTutor. They’re really exciting and they’re free to use!
 
Using VocabKitchen you can check a text against CEFR levels, the Academic Word List (AWL) and the New Academic Word List (NWAL).
 
You can use it to choose which words to teach or change or to get students to profile their own writing. You might want to point out, if using the CEFR list, that the majority of words will be highlighted in blue (A1 level) if the text is grammatically correct. Also, students should note that this only indicates the level of discrete lexical items, idiomatic phrases or collocations which would be considered ‘advanced’ won’t necessarily be highlighted as advanced.
 
For help using LexTutor, have a look at Vocabulary Profiling 2