Introduction to Research Essay

The study of teacher's comments on student papers is of great importance to writing studies because its further study and analysis will ultimately shed ways to improve student's overall quality of writing. Almost anyone with some common sense can compile a reasonable list of guidelines that a teacher could follow when commenting on student writing. These lists would include such things as providing feedback while remembering to be being positive and encouraging and so on. The important thing to focus on here is the "type" of feedback that teacher should provide as this can often be a hinder in helping the students become better writers. There have been several studies done in recent years on teachers and their effects on student writers. A notable researcher in this field is Nancy Sommers who has performed numerous research studies including the production of a film entitled Beyond the Red Ink, which portrays college students speaking about their teacher's responses to their writing. Sommers, in her book Responding to Student Writing suggests that teachers often times bombard students with conflicting comments. They point out grammar errors while also telling the student that his overall idea in the paragraph is unclear. At this point, the student is confused if they should fix the grammar mistakes or rather work making their idea clear. Sommers point out that teachers most often follow the "deficit model", which she identifies as teachers focusing on the wrong, inadequate, and absent in a paper rather than focusing on what the paper actually contains. She goes on to state that teachers should focus on having one purpose while commenting on student writing. In other words, they should focus on one lesson at a time. The teacher should either focus on the grammar or on developing the main ideas. By focusing on one purpose, Sommers hopes that this woul turn into a lesson learned by the students which would then be transported by the student to a future writing piece. Sommers also introduces the impotance and benefits of using a rubric when commenting on students writing [ expand].
 As one can see, extensive research has been done on the best ways teachers can comment on student writing to encourage and assist them in becoming better writers. All these finding however are meaningless if in fact practicing teachers are not aware of these studies and therefore not applying the findings. Existing studies have focused on the benefits of certain teacher comments over others, but they have yet to address if teacher are really using these guidelines. My research findings suggest that further attention and research needs to be devoted to why practicing teacher are not implementing these student commenting guidelines, which previous research already suggest would be beneficial to their overall effectiveness as teachers.