Lee, I.(2003). How do Hong Kong Teachers correct errors in writing? Education Journal, 31 (1), 153-169.

Do not impose your idealized text on my writing.

In this article Lee aims at finding out ways in which ESL composition teachers correct students’ error. Lee aims at investigating how accurate are teachers’ error feedbacks, and whether the error strategy feedback teachers use to correct students’ error have any effect on the students’ original purpose for writing. He points out that if teachers are going to correct their students’ it is important for them to know and understand which strategy  will “reap maximum benefits for the students” ( Lee, p. 153). Researchers in the field of error correction argue whether certain error correction strategies are more beneficial to the students than others. For instance, direct versus the indirect strategy. However, the issue is not what strategy is more beneficial than the other, but how these strategies influence students’ original writing. For instance, teachers might decide to concentrate on students’ writing style instead of marking grammar errors. The question is which of the two strategies have a more detrimental effect on the students’ original purpose for writing?

Lee surveyed and interviewed Hong Kong based ESL composition teachers.  He then asked a selected number of teachers to mark a high school student’s essay (a letter of complaint), whose English proficiency is slightly above average. He did this in order to find out types of strategies teachers adopted when providing error correction feedback. These teachers were then asked to show how they approached the error correction task, the number of errors they have selected and the category of the error (Lee,p. 157). In his finding Lee was able to show that some of the teachers had the tendency of over marking student’s essay. Teachers also grouped errors based on their perception of the nature of the error. This is interesting because it seems the teachers were having difficulties in deciding which error to mark and which to live alone.  Form a personal experience, this type of dilemma is one that quite a number of ESL teachers have to deal with while marking students’ essay. One is constantly asking oneself when is it too much or too little error correction, and does it really matter? Another interesting finding was that only slightly over half of the teachers’ error feedbacks were accurate and other feedbacks where unnecessary. Lee states that the latter should raise concern, because these unnecessary feedbacks can be misleading and might cause students to deviate from their original purpose for writing.

Although I fully agree with Lee, I don’t think that the unnecessary feedback could be the only ones that might cause students to deviate from their original purpose for writing. I think all error feedback strategies have a potential to do so.  As ESL composition teachers I think we should evaluate our error feedback strategies and see whether they inhibit students’ development by forcing them to focus on what we want instead of their own purpose for writing. The question is how do we do so? Are there readily strategies that we as ESL composition can use, if not, how do we tackle this challenge?