Getting to the Good Stuff

How can peer editing aid communication in a language class?

Until this post, I have focused on the importance of relationships and community building with my high school students. I assure you, I do more than dance around a classroom and joke with my students. Somewhere along the way they need to learn Spanish. So let’s get to the good stuff…Communication! It’s at the heart of everything I do as a Spanish teacher, and writing is the most powerful tool I know to promote communication and language development.

To put it all together, this year I’m going to capitalize on my group work philosophy to improve student writing via peer editing practices.

Participating in the Greater Madison Writing Project and creating a Teacher Workshop have helped me reflect on how I implement the writing process in my classroom. The Teacher Workshop encouraged me to examine struggles I have while teaching writing. In previous years I noticed that student writing was superficial. Maybe I didn’t give my students enough time to develop their ideas or solicit feedback from their peers? It occurred to me that if I improve peer-editing practices in my classroom, students will focus on revising content rather than continually editing grammar. Focusing on the content of classmates’ writing will help my juniors and seniors become deeper thinkers and analytical writers themselves…at least that’s the dream.

Thanks to David R. Boyd’s article Practical Tips for Implementing Peer Editing Tasks in the Foreign Language Classroom, I’m now well versed in several techniques of peer-editing that will suit different types of writing and classroom dynamics.

1. Classic Peer Editing: Students read their writing aloud to reader-response groups as they write comments and group members take turns sharing their comments with the author. While this could be time-consuming, having participated in this with my own response group, I appreciate both the feedback as well as the bond I share with my group.
2. Silent Peer Editing: This is my old go-to. Students trade papers and are given a checklist and opportunity to add comments. New to me is the idea that editors would read papers twice: first for content and organization, second for grammar and mechanics. Giving my students time to specifically focus on content should make their writing more profound.
3. Reader-Response Editing: Students trade papers with a partner. The editor reads the partner’s paper aloud making comments as they read while the author records feedback on his or her own draft. To be honest, this is the protocol that scares me both as a teacher and a writer. Having someone else read your own words is intimidating enough, now throw in the fact that we’re speaking our second language? It may be more appropriate for my mature classes.
4. Colored Markers: Each person in a group is assigned a color and a topic which could be grammatical, content based, or focused on organization. The paper gets passed around and each individual makes comments on the assigned content. This could be particularly helpful by asking students to look for in-depth analysis and evidence.

Additionally, a point that I have seen emphasized in much of my research and reinforced by Byrd is the importance of modeling all of these peer editing practices. In order for students to give meaningful feedback to their peers, they need to know expectations. Byrd recommended the teacher model with a piece of writing from the previous year to walk the class through a specific technique. Brilliant!

So there you have it. Since my students already have the foundation of group work and an established community of learners, I am hopeful that they will transition well into these protocols. As we know, when teaching teenagers everything goes perfectly as planned, so I expect absolutely no problems. Yes, that was obvious sarcasm, so I’ll leave you with this: These are my intentions.

Please come back to read about their implementation in real life and my response to the unanticipated questions that will surely arise when teaching unpredictable adolescents how to communicate in their second language.