Strategies of EFL teachers and students in correcting and revising composition errors

Abstract

ABSTRACT STRATEGIES OF EFL TEACHERS AND STUDENTS IN CORRECTING AND REVISING COMPOSITION ERRORS Since EFL teachers are traditionally interested more in the form than in the content of student compositions and spend more time correcting syntactic and mechanical errors than content ones, this study investigates how EFL teachers correct errors and how their students revise them. Four hypotheses were tested and observations were made concerning strategies of teacher correction and student revision. In the first part, it was hypothesized that EFL teachers are interested more in the form than in the content of student compositions and that the students, *?-??? following the teachers' instructions, consequently will revise more form-based errors than content or organizational ones. The results of two independent t-tests indicate that teachers marked significantly more (p<.001) syntactic and mechanical errors than content and organizational errors while students revised significantly more (p<.001) syntactic and -meehan-ieal- errors-than -content and organizational ones. Thus, these results have confirmed the validity of the hypothesis that EFL teachers focus more on the form than on the content of the student compositions and that students do the same in the revision process.In the first part, it was also hypothesized that there would be no significant difference between the types and numbers of errors corrected by the teacher and those revised by the students. The results have confirmed this hypothesis. A Chi-Square test has shown (X2=0.34) no significant difference between teachers and students in their correcting and revision strategies, respectively. In the second part, it was hypothesized that since teachers are more interested in syntactic and mechanical errors than in content and organizational ones, consequently they will be more satisfied with revisions of the former than with those of the latter. Although the teachers were more satisfied with the revisions of syntactic and mechanical errors than with content and organizational ones (80% to 72%), the Chi- Square Test shows no significant difference (X2=1.40) between the two categories of teacher satisfaction. Thus, this hypothesis was rejected. With regard to the teachers' correction strategies, teachers were found correcting student composition errors by simply writing the correct version of errors (55%) or using correcting code letters (29.2%) rather than explaining errors or giving clues to the students (15.7%) to draw their attention to errors. While correcting the errors by `writingcorrect version of errors` it was observed that some teachers made their own grammatical mistakes in correcting and confused the students. As a result, this study revealed Turkish EFL teachers' lack of concern for content and organization of student compositions and their over-emphasis on syntax and mechanics. Many of the examples confirm these hypotheses in question. Finally, some suggestions were made for further research in order to solve these problems.