Nancy Sommers--"Responding to Student Writing"

College Composition and Communication, Vol. 33, No. 2, May 1982

• Commenting on student writing is time consuming.
• "For it seems, paradoxically enough, that although commenting on student writing is the most widely used method for responding to student writing, it is the least understood" (148).
• Commenting on essays emulates an audience for the student. 
• We're aware of its importance in the composing process, but "we don't know how our theory squares with teachers' actual practice--do teachers comment and students revise as the theory predicts they should?
• Sommers and her research team sought to discover "not only what determines which of these comments the students choose to use or to ignore when revising" (149).
• Studied comment styles of 35 teachers at NYU and U of Oklahoma. 

Issues in teacher generated feedback.

1. 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.

• The students stop writing about what they want to write about--they alter the original argument--and instead model their revisions based on what they perceive the teacher's preferred answer is.

• This happens primarily when teachers focus their feedback on local, grammar issues, giving the students "an impression of the importance of these errors that is all out of proportion to how they should view these errors at this point in the process. 
• Teachers also contradict themselves in this part of the process by telling students to fix local issues and then telling them "that the particular paragraph needs to be more specific or to be developed more" (150).
• Students cannot recognize which issue is of primary importance. If we're asking them to edit, but then saying that the paragraph needs to be revised as a whole, we're sending a contradictory message that's hard to compute and navigate.
 

2. "Most teachers' comments are not text-specific and could be interchanged, rubber-stamped, from text to text" 

• Teachers provide vague directives that are not individualized.  
• "There seems to be among teachers an accepted, albeit unwritten canon for commenting on student texts. 
•  Teachers do not offer any strategies to go along with their vague comments. 
• In reference to providing arbitrary rules about writing: "the rules do not help the student to take stock of his (or her) ideas and use the opportunity he has, during revision, to develop those ideas" (154).
• Teachers who take this approach use a commenting style fit for final grade commenting, not revision. 

• Conclusion
• Writing instructors aren't being taught how to engage with student texts. 
• Many instructors when providing feedback look for errors and build their comments around that: "We read with our preconceptions and preoccupations, expecting to find errors, and the result is that we find errors and misread our students' texts (154)"
• "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 from the ones that they themselves identify, by forcing students back into the chaos, back to the point where they are shaping and restructuring their meaning" (154).
• "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...Written comments need to be an extension of the teacher's voice--an extension of the teacher as reader" (154).