Reducing Composition Errors: An Experiment

TLDR: In this paper, the problem of recurring errors is not peculiar to the teaching of German, and the question remains, therefore, what measures teacher and student can take to ameliorate the situation and how to bring an appreciable decline in errors from one essay to the next, or at least from course beginning to course end.

Abstract: and over again, despite the fact that they have studied certain rules of grammar.1 Fortunately or unfortunately, the problem of recurring errors is not peculiar to the teaching of German. The question remains, therefore, what measures teacher and student can take to ameliorate the situation. How can students be brought to show an appreciable decline in errors from one essay to the next, or at least from course beginning to course end? Numerous suggestions have been advanced by foreign language methodologists, educational psychologists, and applied linguists as to how writing skills might best be developed. While many seem worthy of implementation, few offer data to support their claims of efficacy. For example, in Cooper's excellent article on the effects of sentence-combining techniques, he admits that no data were available to indicate whether positive correlations existed between the successful "hastened development of syntactic maturity" and grammatical accuracy (i.e., correctness of expression, excluding lexical errors).2 What suggestions have professionals in the field advanced to develop writing skills so that student errors decrease as their writing skill matures? A perusal of the professional literature leads to the conclusion that the following represent components of an effective strategy for the development of writing skills-at least for most modern foreign languages taught in this country. Comprehensive Error Correction. While selective correction of errors is certainly defensible in the development of speaking skills, the same cannot be said where writing skills are concerned. Unless all errors are identified, the faulty linguistic structures, rather than the correct ones, may become ingrained in the student's interlanguage system. Thompson's pragmatic position on error correction is difficult to rebut: "The student does not improve his skill if his work is not corrected."3