Using Google Docs for Reviewing Students’ Writing

This is a guest post by Inna Mezentseva from Ina Mez Blog. If you have any feedback or would like to write a guest post for this blog, we’d love to hear from you! Please feel free to leave a comment or review below or on Facebook or Twitter.

Before integrating any kind of digital technology into your classroom, there is one question you need to ask yourself, and that is: “What is the goal?” The first answer I have heard so many teachers give was “for fun”. Indeed, with so many online games, quizzes, and videos available today, it is easy to be a ‘bored teacher’ and resort to such resources in order to show how modern a teacher you are or as a means to keep the students entertained.

However, technology should not be used for the sake of technology; it should solve problems, make learning more effective, and help you to accomplish goals which would otherwise be difficult or even impossible. Examples of such mindful uses of technology may include using a videoconferencing app if real-life encounters are impossible, using apps to drill grammar to create a paperless classroom, and allowing students to practice anywhere anytime, using authentic videos for practicing listening and pronunciation in the absence of native speakers, and so on.

One idea involves using Google Docs in your teaching practice to enable you to review your students’ writing. This is not only aimed at making your lessons more varied or amusing, but will also make learning much more efficient in a number of different ways. The procedure is to ask the students to submit their piece of writing in Google Docs. This can be done in two ways: your students can either share the links to their texts on their own Google Drives, or (if not all of them have Google accounts) you could create a folder for your students’ texts on your own Google Drive and ask them to upload their documents there.

After the technical part is over, I review the writing in all or some of the following ways:

1) I highlight parts of text in different colours, depending on the type of mistake or the type of correction needed. Possible categories may include:

• grammar mistakes
• vocabulary mistakes (wrong choice of words, errors in collocation)
• register mistakes (inappropriate language, too formal or informal, both in terms of grammar and vocabulary)

You can also highlight various types of grammar mistakes in different colours as well – for instance, anything concerning morphemes (misuse or absence of 3rd person singular ‘s’ or the particle ‘to’ before an infinitive) can be highlighted in orange, mistakes related to word order in green, prepositions in purple, etc.

Pic 1: Highlighting

In the screenshot above, grammar or vocabulary mistakes are highlighted in lilac, while the sentences that need some paraphrasing or are not clear are highlighted in orange. I also explain what is wrong in the comments.

2) I leave comments for feedback. I mainly use two types of comments:

(a) One option is to highlight a piece of text which needs improving and ask a few questions or give a few hints or tips to help the student paraphrase that part (an example of such a comment can be seen in the screenshot above);

(b) Secondly, comments are a great way to leave feedback on the content of the text. You can:

– Provide positive feedback outlining the strengths of the student’s work (e.g. great use of linkers, coherence, clarity of expression, advanced-level vocabulary).

Pic 2: Whole text feedback

In this comment I provide positive feedback, outline the strengths of that piece of writing, and give some suggestions on how the text can be improved (see the next point).

– Give advice on how the text can be improved: tell the students to be more attentive with the capitalisation of geographical terms and names, to use more linkers to connect ideas, to state the main ideas more clearly in an essay, etc. Be sure to provide links to related resources, like websites or your own materials, which would help your students to tackle the weaknesses of their writing, e.g. rules of essay- or report-writing, related grammar rules, ways of expressing personal opinion, linkers, etc.

Pic 3: Links

When correcting some of the mistakes, I attach links to related resources. You should help your students work on their mistakes instead of simply correcting them.

– Ask further questions and tell the student to answer them online (as a reply to the comment) or add their answers to the text; or you can ask them to think about the answer and share it during the next lesson. Such questions should refer to the ideas expressed by the student and are aimed at either encouraging the student to amplify the topics mentioned and look at them in more depth, or to promote further thinking and discussion of the topic.

Pic 4: Further discussion

In the final comment, I ask a simple thought-provoking question (the student’s level is Elementary) and suggest discussing it at the next lesson.

A great extension of using Google Docs in this way would be to organize peer-review, if you are working with a group of students. Not only does it provide additional language practice, develop correction skills and encourage mindful exploration of the language by the students, it also allows students to review other students’ work anonymously, which alleviates the psychological pressure that some people experience when they have to point out a mistake or leave negative feedback. At the same time, this practice encourages students to show empathy and find something positive to comment on. Be sure to provide the students with clear guidelines on how to give feedback and correct another person’s text.

Get started with Google Docs here

Image: https://www.pngkey.com/