A Scary Experience?

The essay given by Miss Yoon to be marked was quite a challenge. After reading it a couple of times, I finally understood the whole essay written. I realised the errors that the student made was mainly failure to express himself/herself in proper English and grammatical errors. I felt that the student wasn't able to express himself/herself well in proper English as most of the sentences were directly translated from Mandarin to English. The student’s grammar errors were mainly on past and present tenses. I give credits for a good story where you can actually see the plot of the story that consisted of introduction, rising action, climax, falling action and conclusion.

The method I'd use would be written comments. This is because not only does his/her essay follow the format of a common story writing plot, it is also not hard to understand. By circling the grammar errors and underlining the unclear sentences, the student would be able to understand where he/she made a mistake. I would also try using the method on talking to the writer about the errors he/she made as it might be easier for me to explain what to do and what not to do in the future. But this may take up a lot of time as there are other student’s essays to tend to.

Peer editing would definitely be a good way for students to improve on his/her writing. I would encourage students to come together in a group to help edit one another’s essay. Through this, students are not only able to identify mistakes and errors, they will be able to improve themselves while helping edit others' essay.

As for the follow-up activity, I would provide some activities on forming simple sentences in a specific structure so that he/she will be able to produce better sentences in the future rather than a sentence translated from Mandarin to English. Besides that, I would also provide activities like changing sentences from present tense to past tense to improve his/her grammar.