Examples of Procedure Text
b. To give the student writer a sense of audience their interests and
expectations and make them ameliorate their writings accordingly. c.
To offer students an impetus for revision, for without comments from a critical reader, writers will feel no need to revise thoroughly if they
ever think about revision.
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Sommers who thinks that such comments constitute a challenge for teachers of writing since they have to address a number of issues such as,
motivating students to revise and rewrite their work using the feedback, targeting areas of failure in students‟ learning, and making students
understand and incorporate teachers‟ suggestions in their writings:
The challenge we face as teachers is to develop comments which will provide inherent reason for students to revise; it is a
sense of revision as discovery, as a process of beginning again, as starting out new, that our students have not learned. We need to
show our students how to seek, in the possibility of revision, the dissonances of discovery- to show them through our comments why
new choices would positively change their texts, and thus, to show them the potential for development implicit in their writing.
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Assuming that the aspects of language actually taught in classroom are the ones teachers focus on when commenting on s
tudents‟ writing, Hyland introduces a list of the main foci of teacher written feedback. The
six main foci of feedback adopted from him are: focus on language structures, focus on text functions, and focus on creative expression,
focus on writing process, focus on content, and focus on genre
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. However, Harmer distinguishes only two foci which provide the basis for
a distinction between two types of written commentary: responding and
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Nancy Sommers, Responding to student writing. College Composition and Communication, 33, 1982, p. 156.
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Nancy Sommers, loc. cit.
46
Ken Hyland, loc. cit.
correcting
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. Responding emphasizes the idea that the main concern of feedback is not primarily the accuracy of students‟ performance, but it is
the content and design of their writing. Correcting, by contrast, is limited to an indication of what students fail to perform in different language
aspects such as, grammar, syntax, concord, etc. Hyland points out that for any feedback type to be effective, attention to what individual students
want from and the use they make of it must be paid. He, thus explains that, some students want praise, others see it as condescending; some
want a response to ideas, others demand to have all their errors marked; some use teacher commentary effectively, others ignore it altogether.
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