|
Aims and Objectives of
WAC@CUHK
The aims and objectives of the
WAC programme at CUHK are to improve
students’ proficiency in written English and
their thinking and reasoning skills, by
(a) encouraging
teachers in all disciplines to give more writing assignments;
(b) providing
writing tutors to give feedback to students.
WAC provides feedback on early drafts to
improve the final versions handed in for marking.
Research has shown that
most students ignore feedback on already-graded papers because they
are mainly interested in the grade.
WAC’s approach is based on ‘process writing’,
which requires:
(a) pre-writing
exercises, including assignment planning;
(b) multiple
drafts of papers, to improve structure and presentation;
(c) student
‘peer review’ of their own classmates’ written drafts, to check and
improve intelligibility and flow of argument;
(d) face-to-face
meetings between WAC tutors and students to whom they give feedback on
written drafts;
(e) teacher
feedback on students’ drafts.
WAC prefers its affiliated courses to include at
least three of these five features.
WAC
does not focus on grammar when providing feedback on papers. Why not?
Research indicates that even the most intensive and
systematic feedback on grammar produces hardly any improvement in
subsequent writing. However, repeated grammatical errors that cause
irritation to the reader (such as frequent errors in subject-verb
agreement, tenses, prepositions) are dealt with in marginal comments.
WAC deals with papers that have numerous grammatical errors on every
page by correcting the errors on the first two pages and asking the
student to correct the rest.
WAC
instructs its tutors to provide feedback on student writing as
follows:
1. Read the entire
paper through at least once without providing any
feedback.
2. Read the paper again, paying attention to
the most important issue of content and organization.
3.
In an endnote, address the major points clearly without attempting to
address every single problem in the paper. Focus on the most
important issues.
4. Go back and add marginal comments.
These procedures
require time. Students must therefore submit their work to WAC in good
time, otherwise WAC cannot provide adequate feedback.
|
