Student voice 1
This chimes with the findings of Schmidt and O'Dochartaigh (2001: 21) who state:

Students indicated in interview that if they were given too many assignments, they tended to just 'get them done' and move on to the next one. There was a clear suggestion that over-assessing can lead to a surface approach to learning. The students use dictionaries to find the right phrases for the assignment, but they have little or no time to spend actually absorbing those phrases into their active vocabulary.

Quite apart from the implications of this for students' learning of the language, such over-assessment also inevitably means that teachers have less time to provide students with feedback on the work. This can often only be tackled at departmental level, although if you have responsibility for a module, you can at least start there and encourage discussion of the topic more widely. There can be no doubt, language courses do feature a lot of assessment compared with other modules, and there are good reasons to do with language acquisition why this should be so, but there are ways in which we can reduce the burden for staff and students and, at the same time, make the learning experience of assessment more effective. Computer-aided assessment with built-in feedback has a clear role to play here (see 13.3.4).

Student voice 2
One response is to provide a module outline at the start of the course, with a timetable of session topics and assessed work deadlines. It may be that your department or school would agree to an extension in such circumstances, although there are those who might think students just need to organize their time better and plan their workload, as they would have to do in most jobs.

Activity 2
Other issues that the self-assessment form might have included are:

• reference to interesting content;
• being mindful of target audience (ie who the piece of writing is notionally aimed at);
• use of paragraphs and essay structure;
• ability to back up arguments with examples;
• use of connectors to link paragraphs;
• in academic essays, use of academic apparatus (quotations, references, etc).

Tutor voices 4 and 5
The pressures on university lecturers have grown enormously in recent years and this graduate's recollections of, perhaps, cosier times are not applicable to contemporary university life. Nevertheless, we must not ignore the major role assessment plays in effective learning, and the professional duty we have to ensure our students receive constructive and practical feedback on their work. While our group sizes may now be nearer 20 than 12, we really owe students something more than comments such as 'Quite a good effort' or 'Room for improvement'. If appropriate (eg on translations), a 'correct' version might be supplied and, to save time having to write out lengthy comments on each piece of work, a feedback sheet such as that provided in Appendix 1 might be employed, including a specific line such as: 'To move into a higher category next time/to gain an extra 10%, you need to………' (see also Student Voice 5, section 13.5.1). Alternatively, the type of criteria grids in Appendix 2 might be used with appropriate additional, personalized comments.

Of course, what students are most interested in is the mark you give them, as the teacher's recollection of his student days confirms. However, in much of the work students do, the mark is, or should be, of secondary importance. Marking and feedback are primarily about improving the quality of learning, not providing a summative judgement on performance (see section 13.1.5). It may well be that even if we employ a formative approach, students will persist in noting only the mark. The reason for this might lie in issues beyond lecturers' control (eg the effects of modularization) but this is no reason for not trying to underscore the role of formative feedback by, for example, handing back non-assessed homework without a mark, getting students to focus on comments and corrections, and only revealing the mark awarded after this discussion has taken place.

Student voice 5
Finding some time outside of class when we are available to talk to students is essential. It is advisable to set up regular consultation hours, a fixed time each week when students can drop in to see you without an appointment. Also you might consider an e-mail enquiry day or afternoon a couple of times per semester when students can ask you questions specifically about assessment and marking.

Some people believe that by avoiding the use of red pen when marking, we show more respect to students' work and avoid possibly damaging psychological effects. Regardless of your views on the use of red pen versus pencil or less stark, 'authoritarian' ink, it clearly is demotivating for weaker students to see purely negative marking, eg a mass of corrections and exclusively critical comments in the margin. It is therefore a good idea to include some comments on positive features - even if these may be rather tokenist in certain cases - and some ticks amidst the underlinings and written corrections. If a student feels he or she has got at least something right, the task of tackling all the problem areas will seem a little less daunting.

Activity 4

1. Since, as we have seen, errors play an important role in language acquisition, we really should correct or at least mark up all errors in students' written work. If we don't tell them, how are they to know it's not right? And how are they to know what counts as a serious error? Tutors sometimes do not mark all errors out of fear of demoralizing weaker learners. Rather than ignoring errors, it is probably better in such cases to mark positively too, ie to flag up things the student has got right. If a student is very weak and you find yourself having to correct large amounts of text, an alternative might be to focus on one main item (eg verb agreement, gender, adjective endings) and mark this severely and with abundant comment, but to mark other errors in another, less prominent colour or via underlining only.
2. As a blanket approach, this is probably the least effective: it increases the amount of red pen on the students' work, is more time-consuming for the tutor and does nothing to encourage a student to think about the nature of the error and how it might be improved. However, it is a necessary approach in cases where the tutor suspects that even with extra help the student will not be able to self-correct. It is also required when students use inappropriate idioms or expressions, since most are unlikely to be able to correct these themselves.
3. - 4. Just underlining errors and encouraging students to self-correct is a good idea if you are confident all students are capable of this in all cases. Usually, however, this will prove too demanding for all but the most able. A useful modification that can help point students in the right direction is to colour-code your underlinings according to type of error. I once had a colleague who employed the following scheme: · red for morphological and word order errors; · green for vocabulary errors; · yellow for punctuation and spelling problems.
5. - 6. Giving students clues in this way can help them to correct many errors themselves (cf James's distinction of errors from mistakes and slips - see section 13.4.2), while those that they are unable to fathom for themselves can be covered by the tutor in group feedback. This is an especially useful approach with grammar errors. The important thing is that the signs and symbols the tutor uses in the margin are (a) clear and unambiguous, and (b) familiar to the students (see Module 14, section 14.2.5 for sample schemes in French, German and Spanish that can be readily adapted to other languages; Appendix 4 is one that I use in German). A variation on letter annotations in the margin, is to provide a reference to the relevant section of the recommended course grammar, eg 'see French Grammar, paragraph 82.4'.

Activity 7
Once again, there is no correct answer to these questions. All teachers have their own way of providing oral correction. There is very little evidence to suggest one particular approach is more effective than any other since there are so many variables involved, including teacher personality and, just as importantly, learner types: some learners will respond better to certain types of correction than others. This questionnaire and what follows are offered merely in the spirit of awareness-raising, providing you with the opportunity to reflect on how you currently correct students and to consider whether there is anything you might like to add to your repertoire of techniques.

With regard to self-correction, here are several possible approaches (cf Kleppin, 1998: 76-77):

1. Simply tell the student something is wrong and leave them to find and correct the error (can be very difficult for the student).
2. Indicate where the error is - eg 'He has [what] the channel??' [swum].
3. Give additional help through metalanguage (eg 'it's feminine', 'use the accusative', 'passive!')
4. Let the student know something is wrong through non-verbal means (eg gesturing with hands; frowning; raising an index finger and shaking your head; clicking your fingers; repeating part of the student's utterance, pausing before the error and raising your intonation - eg 'As usual, the warnings have been _______?').
5. Give the start of a word ('inter____?').
6. Give the opposite of a word ('not easy, but…..?').
7. Remind students when and where they learnt the particular item.

There is also the question of what to do after students have corrected themselves. The options here are:

• Not do anything else and move on.
• Get either the student who made the mistake or someone else in the group to repeat the correction.
• Repeat the correction yourself.
• Ask for or provide further explanation about the corrected form or expression.

If you correct the error yourself, on the other hand, the options include:

• Leave it at that and move on.
• Get a sign (eg a nod of the head) that the student who made the mistake understands, and move on.
• Get the student who made the mistake to repeat the correction.
• Or, as above, initiate further explanation.