The Self-Correction Technique of Guided Feedback

One major advantage that classroom teachers have over online teachers is the ability to interact with students directly, and help them correct their own mistakes on writing tasks. Immediately. Directly. Face-to-face.  Try to get the students to understand what they are doing wrong for themselves. One way to do this is through the self-correction technique. This is what I usually do in class.

When I return writing tasks (IELTS or general English) to my students, they come with little letters above the words or phrases, codes to tell them what type of mistake that there making. Is it a missing word?(mw) Is it a lexical, a word choice, error?(wc) Is it a grammar error?(gr) Spelling?(sp) Then, I insist that the students don't just look at it and put it away, that they do their best to correct their own mistakes, and then ask me,  "Hey teacher, is this right now?" or, "I'm sorry teacher, I don't understand what I did wrong here. Please help."
and of course, I do.

As I think self-discovery is truly the best way of learning, I would like to try to bring this approach to the IELTS students I help online. Hence my inclusion of the self-correct option in the ongoing 6 for 66 promotion.

However, we're not face to face,  and although I could certainly do it via Skype or something like that, that's not always practical. I just needed an eager student who was willing to accept criticism and use it to improve what they were doing.

Frankly, I think my hopes were a little bit too high thinking that I could teach someone in one day, in one afternoon how to fix their writing.  No, that's not possible.  At least, it's not feasible.

But First, an intro video!



I was willing to give it a try if I could find a malleable student I'm not going to reveal his name, but he really had the classic issues of over-complicating his ideas that I so often see. He also tried to use high level vocabulary that didn't fit the sentence and the precise meaning he was looking for. Although his ideas were well supported, because he knew how to write an IELTS essay in terms of structure, the ideas he he was presenting were missing one thing.

Here is how my first Facebook self-correction student
and I began out interaction.

Now, in IELTS, you do not have to have good ideas.  Your ideas can be quite unlikely, even patently false. So don't worry about having good ideas. H owever, your ideas must be directly connected to the question, must address the question as asked.  In other words, you need to write about the specific situation, people or discussion mentioned in the question.

Anything that does not address the question is something you shouldn't be writing.  With that in mind, let's take a look at "A"'s first attempt at his essay. Lets see if I could teach someone how to write a Band 7 task 2 (in TR at least) in a single morning.





Now, the self-correction process should involve some interaction between teacher and student in that process, which is probably something I should have explained better. The student should be able to fix a good portion of their errors, but not all of them. Any which are not understood, like "why is most of the second body paragraph marked up for Task Response?", we could work out together...

But the student had a second draft to me right away. It may have been less than the 40 minutes it should take to write one. 

There's a video comparing the two letters, but my software and I had a disagreement about showing both open windows at the same time (of note, that can't be done)

That's the second attempt, over there on the left.

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