Composition Slaves

Yesterday, though the weather was terrible (rainstorm signal and typhoon signal no. 3 were hoisted), I still attended the seminar held in Chinese University about marking students' compositions. Why did I go? In the first place, this talk was given by one of my scholastic idols, Prof. Icy Lee who is an international second writing expert. Second, I want to know how I can help my students who are mainly local teachers to revolutionize their marking practices. Third, through listening to some sharing given by the frontline teachers, I can understand more how teachers do their marking in secondary classrooms.

The summary of the talk is that teachers spent far too much time on marking which is neither productive nor beneficial to students' learning. The other point is that a handful of teachers want to try out some alternative methods on marking, but due to their seniority, they were not allowed to do so and oftentimes, they had to stick to the marking policy stipulated by their panel heads.

Towards the end of this seminar, Prof. Icy Lee mentioned few good ideas on effective marking which I totally agreed. First, we should attempt focused marking, highlighting those common errors and priotizing them in different marking. Students are unable to 'notice' or correct all their errors if we mark their compositions comprehensively. Second, she suggested that having conferences with students, even just very short ones, would be beneficial to students' understanding of their errors and of how they could take appropriate actions to revise their compositions. Of course, there is still long way to go to have a real battle to revolutionize teaching marking practices, but no doubt, Prof. Icy Lee could give us some insightful directions to plan ahead what we should do in the next five years.