Forty Paragraphs in One Evening: Selective Correction in a Bengali-Medium English Class
Priyanka teaches English to Class VII (38 students) in a Bengali-medium school where English is a second language. The class has just written a 120-word descriptive paragraph on 'A market scene'. One student, Arnab, writes: 'The market was very crowded. My father and me went there. He don't like crowds. I am living in this town since 2015 so I know this market. Suddenly a man gave me a advice about the cheap fish. The both of us laughed.' His paragraph nevertheless contains one genuinely vivid sentence - 'The fish stared at us with silver eyes from the ice' - and is organised in a clear time order. Priyanka has to return the notebooks tomorrow, has 40 paragraphs to mark, and the report card gives a single overall mark for writing. Her colleague says the solution is to circle every error in red so students 'see the standard'.
1. Which errors in Arnab's paragraph would you correct now and which would you leave? State the principle and give the corrected forms.
Read the worked answer
Principle: correct what is meaning-blocking, rule-governed, teachable at this stage, and recurring across the class - and no more than three items per script, so that attention is not spread thin.
Correct now:
| Error | Correction | Why now |
|---|---|---|
| 'He don't like crowds' | 'He doesn't like crowds' | Third-person singular agreement is rule-governed, very high frequency, and heavily stigmatised outside school. |
| 'My father and me went there' | 'My father and I went there' | Pronoun case in subject position; one clear rule; recurs in every narrative. |
| 'a advice' | 'advice' (or 'a piece of advice') | Countability of abstract nouns is a persistent, easily fixable pattern with many common words. |
Leave for now, with a code in the margin:
- 'I am living here since 2015' → 'I have lived / have been living here since 2015'. This is a tense-aspect system point, not a slip; correcting it today without teaching it produces a correction the student cannot act on. Mark it 'T' and deal with it in the tense unit. Alternatively, teach it as a chunk: 'I have lived here since 2015.'
- 'The both of us' → 'Both of us'. Low frequency, stylistic, and not worth one of the three slots.
And mark the strengths explicitly: underline 'The fish stared at us with silver eyes from the ice' and write one line on why it works, plus a note on the time order. A script that returns with only deficits teaches the student that his best sentence does not count.
2. Design a feedback system that lets you mark 38 paragraphs in one evening, is consistent across scripts, and produces something the class can act on.
Read the worked answer
A three-part system, fixed before marking starts.
1. A correction menu of five codes only, written on the board and copied into the front of every notebook: SVA (subject–verb agreement), PRON (pronoun case), ART (article/countability), TENSE, SP (spelling). Five is the working limit; more codes are not remembered.
2. A fixed script routine, 90 seconds each. One strength comment (not 'good'), up to three coded errors with the correction written in by the student later, and one tick on a four-criterion slip: content and detail, organisation, sentence variety, accuracy. This gives the single report-card mark a defensible breakdown instead of a number pulled from the air.
3. A tally sheet beside you. Every code used gets a stroke. After 38 scripts the tally is the lesson plan: whatever code is highest becomes a ten-minute slot next day, taught with anonymous examples drawn from three scripts (never named).
Time budget: 38 × 90 seconds is 57 minutes, plus 15 minutes for the tally and the lesson note. The saving comes from not rewriting sentences, not correcting every error, and not writing the same comment eighteen times.
The follow-through that makes it feedback rather than marking: every student writes a corrected version of their three coded sentences in the next class. The teacher checks only those three lines, at a glance, while the class writes.
3. Your colleague argues for circling every error in red. How do you respond, using what is known about corrective feedback, without overclaiming?
Read the worked answer
Concede the shared premise first: both of you want Arnab to see the standard. The disagreement is about mechanism, not standards.
The case against circling everything:
- Attention is finite. Arnab's paragraph contains at least five error types plus a strong image. Marking all five gives him no signal about which two matter, and the evidence on written corrective feedback points the same way: focused, selective correction on one or two targeted structures produces more uptake than comprehensive correction, which tends to produce avoidance - students write shorter, safer sentences to reduce red marks. That is the opposite of what this paragraph needs, since its best feature is a risky, vivid sentence.
- A circled error is not yet feedback. It becomes feedback only if the learner does something with it. Circling without a required revision step is marking, not teaching, and it is the revision step that costs the teacher ten minutes and produces the learning.
- Affective cost is real but modest. Red ink is not the villain; the absence of any positive comment on a script that contains a genuinely good sentence is. Praise and correction are not in competition.
Where the colleague has a point: students do need to see that errors are noticed. The code system answers this - every script is read closely, and the codes are visible. Also, in the run-up to the examination, controlled writing does need accuracy checks, so a fuller correction once a month is defensible as a review exercise.
Practical compromise to propose: selective coded correction on continuous writing; one fully corrected passage per month, marked together in class against a model.