Rhetoric's Outliers in Second Language Writing | Jay Jordan

Rhetorical Competence

"Effects of Dynamic Corrective Feedback on ESL Writing Accuracy" by K. James Hartshorn, Norman W. Evans, Paul F. Merrill, Richard R. Sudweeks, Diane Strong-Krause, & Neil J. Anderson (2010)

All 22 occurrences in corpus

K. James Hartshorn and colleagues (2010) explored the utility of what they termed "dynamic written corrective feedback." They responded to controversies about the value of corrective feedback, relating that many colleagues have noted that too much sentence-level correction leads to diminishing returns for both students and teachers: it can be time consuming and overwhelming. They also related colleagues' concerns that "errors" persist despite error-focused feedback. Wanting to allay those concerns while questioning what they considered L1-adopted pedagogies that insufficiently focus on accuracy, Hartshorn and colleagues launched a pedagogical experiment with 47 students in a pre-matriculation English language institute in which one class was assigned four long-ish "papers" and the "treatment" class was assigned 10-minute compositions each day on what the authors called "diverse topics" (p. 94). They made two key interventions: first, the teacher in the treatment class corrected everything (but did so on short, relatively low-stakes compositions). Second, the teacher used a list of error codes that students were taught to recognize and apply in revision. They reported that students in the treatment group did become more accurate than their control group peers on a post-condition 30-minute writing task, but that outcomes for fluency and complexity were uncertain compared to the control: in fact, control group students' writing overall appeared slightly more complex and fluent. They hypothesized that accuracy can trade off with other features owing to cognitive load.

"Rhetoric" appeared in this article most prominently in connection with "competence." The authors adapted a rubric from the Test of English as a Foreign Language, selecting criteria that focused on "rhetorical features of writing common to process writing instruction . . . addressing the writing task successfully; demonstrating effective organization and development; providing appropriate examples, details, or support; and conveying a sense of unity and coherence" (p. 91) Interestingly, rhetorical competence is not the goal of the intervention: in fact, the authors concluded by claiming that "most teachers who strive to improve the writing accuracy of their ESL students would welcome such progress [in sentence–level accuracy] even if it meant sacrificing a sentence or two from an essay or a slight reduction in its complexity" (p. 102).