I times the anxiety, stress, writers block, and discouragement I've felt as a writer by at least double when I think about my ESL students. They're writing in a second language (sometimes third or fourth language!). That's amazing. While teaching writing to ESL, please, always keep that perspective, and help students keep that perspective, too. What they are doing is challenging. Not impossible, but challenging. HOW TO TEACH PEER REVIEW TO ESL As I mentioned in the first part of this blog, my methodology for teaching peer review is not full proof. I can't promise it will work in your classroom or for all levels and ages. Even I have to tweak it (I teach the same course every semester), depending on the dynamics of the members of my class. With some variation, though, I generally go through these phases of teaching peer review, sometimes repeating and/or emphasizing some aspects more or less, depending on the group I have:
Writing isn't like that. I've learned that the writing process is not linear. The steps are often repeated over and over. It's messy. It's time consuming. So that's the first thing I teach my students. After I feel like I've hammered that idea, I then start in on the cultural implications of peer review, which is a unique aspect of the writing process. Americans love to collaborate I often ask my students if they've ever done peer review. I usually have one or two hands go up. The rest just stare at me with blank faces. It could be that I teach freshmen, and they are the masters of blank stares, but I also believe that peer review is a unique thing that we teach in our American (western-culture) colleges. We're all about collaboration, working in teams, small groups and getting individualized and personalized feedback. We value the "average-Joe" or individual voice, so when we write, we need to make our ideas original and help each other express our ideas the best we can. And, as ESL, we can use all the help we can get! (Most students believe that part.) What this looks like when I'm teaching
2. PEER REVIEW ISN'T EDITING OR POINTING OUT ERRORS This is the probably the aspect in peer review I emphasize the most for my ESL students. I often go around during peer review to make sure students are practicing this because a lot of them have it in their head that the only feedback you can get (and give) in writing is grammar. It's this misunderstanding that causes most of my students to have poor experience with peer review. They get "bad" or "wrong" advice from peers. It's also the thing that makes students feel like they can't be good peer reviewers. They don't feel qualified to do the "teacher's" job.
If they happen to know the correct past tense for a particular irregular verb or spelling of a difficult word, they can comment on it, but they don't have to. Their job is not to check the grammar. Their job is to share their opinion--- as a reader!--- and what the writer could do to better express his or her ideas. This can come from good questions about the content, looking for and commenting on the effectiveness of the thesis, etc. What this looks like when I'm teaching
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