Conferencing via e-mail: an alternative way to respond to student writing

Abstract

La revista está indexada en los directorios: LATINDEX, REDALYC, IRESIE, CLASE, DIALNET, DOAJ, E-REVIST@S, La revista está incluida en los sitios: REDIE, RINACE, OEI, MAESTROTECA, PREAL, HUASCARAN, CLASCO IntroductionDealing with student writing presents great challenges to many a language instructor.Writing is a skill that is developed through time. Together with this, the assessment of writing assignments needs to be approached as something more than forming final opinions about them (Zamel, 1985). Consequently, considering writing and the learning of this skill as a process comes to be paramount (Carnicelli, 1980). Following this train of thought, a language instructor can respond to student writing rather than merely assigning a grade to it (Ferris, 2003). In this regard, a research project was carried out aiming at researching into an alternative way to respond to student writing, conferencing via e-mail. In so doing, the following research question guided the development of this project: Is conferencing via e-mail an efficient way for an instructor to respond to student writing in an English for Specific Purposes (ESP) class for engineers?This project was of great importance to the language instructor developing this study since it allowed him to explore a method commonly used to respond to student writing, conferencing. Conferencing is normally performed by means of oral exchanges between an instructor and a student. The instructor, then, proceeds to discuss a piece of writing with the student who wrote it to highlight its strengths and points that need improvement in order to find solutions together. However, having regular conferencing sessions with students is very time-consuming. This is a limitation if one considers that the ESP course with which this study was conducted was taught during only two hours per session twice a week. Thus, having oral conferencing exchanges with the students would sacrifice valuable class time. Moreover, the students in this ESP course had very busy schedules, so setting up appointments to meet with them outside the class was not feasible. Therefore, using e-mail as a means to implement conferencing emerged as a viable option to do this. All the students had access to computers and the Internet at their workplace, and they checked their e-mail on a daily basis.As an added value, working with electronic documents provides an instructor with more possibilities to modify student writing assignments to give them feedback (e.g., underlining, highlighting, coloring, changing font type, etc.). Aside from this, sometimes students forget about the required format for their written assignments (e.g., spacing and margins), so inserting comments in their writing is very difficult. Electronic documents eliminate this inconvenience together with that of reading students illegible handwriting. As a result of this project, it was expected that the instructor could examine the efficiency of conferencing via e- Revista Electrónica Actualidades Investigativas en Educación____________________...