Introduction

The current education goals in the B.A. program in English Language Teaching (ELT) of the Universidad Autónoma de Tlaxcala (UATx) include the development of academic literacy including writing in English. Due to the challenges that the development of academic writing poses, it has emerged as a research interest in higher education in Mexico as evidenced by the studies carried out on this topic and context (^{Encinas, Keranen, & Salazar, 2010}; ^{Englander, 2010}; ^{Martins, 2005}; ^{Mora, 2017}; ^{Roux, 2012}; Roux, Mora, & Trejo, 2011). According to ^{Hidalgo (2010)}, such challenges may be caused by the lack previous instruction in academic writing in both Spanish and English. In order to develop students’ writing skills, a series of strategies should be implemented in the general English classes to help them become more independent and effective writers which, in turn, could benefit their motivation as well as their transit to writing more complex texts such as academic documents.

Writing, as the other three language skills, is an intellectual, creative, and methodological process that implies the investment of time and practice to develop it to the fullest in order to achieve clarity and effectiveness. There is a series of steps and strategies that may facilitate it for learners like generating ideas; assembling them coherently; organizing them to write a first draft, which is revised several times; rewriting until the final version is produced. The revision stage is crucial since it promotes and orientates the improvement of the text. If self and peer correction are added as strategies during this stage, learners do not only gain a more appropriate and accurate final version of their text but also knowledge of the writing-as-a-process stages. In addition, the learners can use error codes and error logs during self and peer correction in order to provide and follow-up explicit feedback in an attempt to foster self-awareness of the areas that need improvement. The knowledge and awareness resulting from the practices described above seem to help learners to produce better drafts, be more independent writers, and motivate them to cope with the difficulties of developing the writing skill.

Teaching Writing as a Process

Teaching writing as a process presupposes a change in the teachers’ approach and practices. ^{Murray (2003)} holds that many English teachers “teach writing as a product, focusing their critical attention on what their students have done, as if they had passed literature in to us” (p. 3). That is, many teachers tend to consider learners’ writing as if it were literature which it is not. Moreover, English teachers tend to assign a specific subject or theme for the learners to write about which may, on the one hand, demand knowledge about a topic that students are not familiarized with and on the other, play against their motivation if the learners are not interested in the topic.

When teaching writing as a process, teachers should not expect students to write well from the beginning since teachers should consider the stages of pre-writing, writing, and re-writing. Learners usually read the final text and are not aware of the drafting and correcting that are necessary to produce it. That is why teaching writing should be approached in a way that learners are guided through the edition process, which helps them to become aware not only of the stages for producing a text but also of the strategies that work for them to improve their writing.

In addition, the use of tools like the error code and error log is beneficial for the development of their autonomy as writers. ^{Lalande (1982)} found that American students who used error codes to correct errors in German had greater improvement in writing than the students who had their errors corrected by their teachers, while ^{Ferris (2011)} states that a longitudinal study showed a clear advantage for the use of error logs to improve students’ writing even though the results are not conclusive (due to the small sample included in the study). It is the teacher’s role is to facilitate the time and opportunities for learners to write in a social environment using self-help and external tools. The use of tools provided by the teacher such as an error code and an error log along with explicit guidance may help students to become cognitively aware of the process of writing a text.

Correction in Writing as a Process

In the past, the evaluation of written texts in the English as a foreign language (EFL) context was limited to the identification and/or correction of the linguistic errors produced by the learner, especially spelling and grammar as stated by ^{Zohrabi and Rezaie (2012)}. This approach resulted in the disregard of essential aspects related to the text itself, to the learners, and to the process of writing. For ^{Cassany (2000)} writing should be understood beyond the mechanics of writing such as spelling, calligraphy, and layout to incorporate aspects that are more helpful to determine the adequacy of a text like vocabulary, grammar, cohesion, structure, and register. Taking these aspects into consideration may provide useful information to the learners so their texts may better match their teachers’ expectations.

As for the students, the traditional approach constrains learners’ participation in the assessment of their own texts causing underdevelopment in the awareness of their weaknesses. Such weaknesses may be in the text as a product and/or in the process of writing since learners are used to submitting a written assignment and obtaining a score sometimes without receiving formative feedback which would provide suggestions for improvement. This approach may affect their motivation for writing. This is why ^{Cassany (1989)} suggests what he calls comprehensive evaluation which takes into account the text produced by the learner in addition to the sequence of actions followed to produce it; from the preparation to the production and the edition stages. The previous comments do not mean that traditional correction should be completely eliminated from the teachers’ practices since they should be sensitive to the learners’ needs in terms of their level of L2 proficiency and development as writers. Learners in basic or elementary levels of L2 seem to expect and want error correction that includes the linguistic ones as well. This can be done by balancing the types of feedback in addition to focusing on different aspects of writing according to the different stages of the writing process.

If writing is not taught as a process, it becomes a one-time text production, so the learner writes an assignment with the objective of fulfilling a requirement set by the teacher. That is, viewing writing as a process instead of as a product which would encourage learners to see writing as an opportunity to express their views about a topic and as a learning experience built on the possibility of improving the text through drafting, correcting, and editing to submit a final version of which they may feel proud and satisfied.

Method

The main objective of this exploratory study was to find out if the use of self and peer correction processes in the English class during writing instruction resulted in higher quality texts. The specific objectives were to find out what were the most common types of errors made by the students and discover if the recurrent use of self and peer correction had an impact on the amount of errors made.

The participants were nine students, seven females and two males whose ages ranged from 20 to 22 years old. They were in the sixth semester of the B.A. in language teaching at UATx. In order to learn about the participants’ writing habits, a short survey was applied to the learners; it helped to set the students’ writing practices. Furthermore, the data were collected through two written assignments based on the tasks of the course book and which were revised using an error code and implementing peer correction so two versions of each assignment were submitted (rough and final drafts). In addition, students were asked to register their errors in an error log in order to monitor the type and amount of errors made. At the beginning of the semester the teacher explained how to use the error code and that the writing skill was going to be developed in a systematic way. That is, carrying out the five stages of the writing process. The first assignment was to write a paragraph about their college life-style, the second text produced was an invitation letter to spend the summer with a close friend, the third was a fiction story, and the last one was to express their thoughts about students who work. The second text ranged from 100 to 150 words while the last one ranged from 350 to 400 words.

The error code and error log used for self and peer correction was taken from ^{Zemach and Rumisek (2003)} who suggest a list of 25 error symbols (see Appendix A) with their definition and exemplification to clarify each one. In the regular English class, students submitted their writing tasks as a first draft and they were redistributed by the teacher to implement peer correction. After this first review, students were required to check their partners’ identification of errors and correct them (self-correction) with the intention of improving their writing. Finally, a final draft was submitted to the teacher. Students were also required to include the first peer-reviewed draft with the final version of every written assignment as evidence of the process. Moreover, students were asked to fill in the error log (Appendix B) according to the mistakes marked during peer correction process (Appendix C).

Findings

The most salient information coming from the short survey applied at the beginning of the semester was that two of the students wrote first in Spanish and then translated their texts into English while the rest wrote directly in English. Of the latter, five used prewriting strategies like making notes but four of them did not. All the participants considered that the most challenging elements as regards writing in English were the use of grammar rules, writing interesting texts, and originality. Eight participants thought expressing their ideas and the use of appropriate vocabulary were quite challenging. On the other hand, five of them considered that generating ideas for writing was quite easy.

The error code provided the students contained symbols for 25 types of errors like spelling, word order, wrong form, adding and eliminating words, connectors, and run-on sentences, among others. Students 3 and 9 had the highest rates of types of errors with 12 followed by Student 5 with 11 types of errors, and Students 1 and 7 had five types of errors. Appendix D shows the texts produced by Student 3 before and after peer correction. The lowest rate was five types of errors made by Students 2, 4, 6, and 8. It was interesting to see that even though some students clearly had a higher level of proficiency in English, they had errors that seemed to be fossilized. For example, Student 2 had only six types of errors which were word choice, articles, unclear sentences, verb tense, verb form, and missing words. She committed a mistake related to verb tense only in her first version of Assignment 1 and never made it again but the other five types of errors were present in all of her texts which led the researchers to hypothesize that some of those errors were real problem areas for the student although unclear sentences and missing words could be corrected once the student develops more awareness of the audience and is guided to write her ideas more explicitly.

The most common errors that the participants made in general in their four texts submitted were word choice, verb form, and missing words. It was also found that these types of errors continued to occur throughout the different assignments. This information helped the teacher to implement activities that would help the students to express the doubts they had about the three types of errors and practice them such as extracting parts of the texts and sharing them with the class to find possible solutions to the errors, explaining why the word or verb form should be changed. In some cases, students were recommended to do certain grammar exercises, however, they were suggestions that may or may not have been followed by the learners. Since participation in those activities was not assessed due to the fact that they were not included in the official syllabus and evaluation criteria for the course, we could not attest for their effect. Another common error was word order. This type of error appeared at different points of the participants’ writing but eight of the nine students corrected this error successfully in the final version of the second assignment.

On the other hand, the type of error that students did not find in any occurrence was unclear fragments. However, it is worthwhile to mention that the texts analyzed were peer and self-corrected so the teacher at that point had not yet provided feedback; that is, the teacher could identify other errors that the students overlooked. The following types had a single occurrence: the improper use of capitalization, singular, plural, pronouns, and subject-verb agreement. This is due to the fact that most of the students in this group had an appropriate level of English from the first semester and were the first generation of the program which means that most of them had taken an entrance level test. Most of the students in this group had taken extra school English classes and some had recently returned to Mexico from the United States where they had studied in high schools. The following paragraphs will refer to specific participants that attracted our attention because of the results in their error logs.

Student 4, who probably had the highest level of proficiency, can be said to have committed only one type of error at a time. That is to say, the six types of error she produced were made only once each but in different moments. For example, in the first draft of Assignment 1 there were errors of word form and subject-verb agreement which were successfully self-corrected in the final version where there was a missing word error. The same happened in the second assignment where in the first version, the student had a word order error and in the final version had a word choice error and run-on sentence. We consider that different errors come up in different versions of the assignment because, in each stage, the students extended their compositions which would potentially open the door to additional unsupervised errors.

In terms of the frequency of errors tracked in the error log, it was observed that the errors participants had from the first to the fourth assignment varied. Five participants showed a decrease in their mistakes having from one to six fewer errors. In two cases, they had the same number of errors in the first and final writing; however, in the final version of Assignment 2 and first draft of Assignment 4 they reduced their errors. Only in one case, the participant kept the same number of errors in the first and final draft of Assignment 2 and the final version of Assignment 4 and increased one in the first draft of Assignment 4. Interestingly, the remaining participant made more errors in the last three writings than in the first one which could have been caused because she went from producing a very controlled and short first text to freer, more extensive texts. This is another effect observed during the teaching of writing as a process. It seems to encourage students to write more and take more risks since they appreciated the opportunity they had to experiment with language as the assignments required them to express themselves.

Furthermore, when students received the second draft of the assignment, they went through the revision process which comprises identifying, classifying, and correcting the mistakes they made. They also dealt with the topic of the fourth assignment which was “students who work” because some of them are workers as well as students. With the implementation of these processes, it was possible to create a favorable environment to develop students’ writing skill to do their best with the aid of the materials and the input from peers and the teacher.

Even though number and frequency of errors are important elements to measure progress, a more important effect was sought and achieved-raising students’ awareness of writing as a process and experiencing the benefits of self and peer correction in the hope that they will continue to implement such stages and tools in their future academic writing tasks.

Another aspect observed was that students worked more comprehensively, engaging with their classmates as writers and readers which provided them with benefits such as more confidence to write and lower levels of anxiety. In addition, the roles of the agents in the classroom were reorganized since the teacher was not seen as the owner of knowledge but as a facilitator, as ^{Topping (1998)} pointed out:

Peer assessment involves students directly in learning, and might promote a sense of ownership, personal responsibility and motivation . . . Peer assessment might also increase variety and interest, activity and interactivity, identification and bonding, self-confidence, and empathy with others-for assessors, assesses, or both. (p. 256).

That is, teammates enjoyed the same academic status which made them feel more comfortable when working in pairs, to ask when they had doubts, and to propose and provide solutions not only to their own problems but to their peers’ too.

Conclusions

As a conclusion of this classroom experience, it can be said that self and peer correction as well as the writing as a process approach are worthwhile practices that can be implemented in the writing tasks included in the regular English textbooks. Self-correction raises the students’ awareness about their errors, allowing them to correct the errors themselves and in that process become responsible for their learning and therefore, more independent of the teacher. It also helps them to focus on their own errors as opposed to what happens normally in the classroom where, due to time constraints, teachers address the most common errors found in the assignments which might not be completely relevant to the students who do not make such mistakes.

As for peer correction, it was evident that the way students provided feedback to their partners was done in a friendly, respectful manner which brought about opportunities for them to confirm or disconfirm what they believed was right or wrong. Sometimes the assessment could be wrong because the feedback came from a partner, however, the students were close enough to ask for clarification from the student who provided feedback and with the help of the teacher, find out who was right, leading to learning.

It was also observed that the students developed evaluative and critical skills from their second draft since their errors declined. Spelling, capital letters, pronoun errors, and the rest committed only once proved to be easy to correct. Some of these errors are identified and marked by the computer but it has been seen that when the students do not receive feedback or receive it but in an untimely manner, they continue to make these errors. If peer and self-correction help learners to polish their texts even a little, it will still save time for the teacher when checking their texts and teachers will be able to focus on items that the students have not been able to resolve themselves.

The processes of peer and self-correction carried out systematically contributed to maximizing students’ writing skills through the support of several parties such as error correction tools (the error log and error code) and input from their peers and teachers along with their previous knowledge. In turn, the interaction of these aspects as well as others as motivation to write, interest in the topic, and so forth, bring about chances for discussion, awareness raising, and noticing which can be used as bonding mechanisms by which the students and teachers work together to improve the students’ skills. This formative orientation may result in the formation of a learning community where everybody contributes to each other’s learning.

Because this is a small exploratory study, the authors cannot claim that self and peer correction resulted in significant progress, however, it was observed that throughout the semester of implementation, students became quite comfortable with providing and receiving peer correction and their attitude towards writing seemed to improve. The authors consider these practices should be explored further as well as their results. In order to do so, more English teachers working in this program could be instructed in the writing as a process approach as well as the self and peer correction practices so there is a higher possibility of researching their effects in the development of the writing skill as well as in providing learners with continuity and homogeneity (at least as much as possible and appropriate) in the approach to error treatment and to writing. This is especially important in our context because the students are English teacher trainees who will have the responsibility of developing better literacy practices in their future students.