We've had a few different ways of marking in our MFL department. There has always been a focus of keeping the workload light for teachers (over time) and the impact high for students.
I thought it might be useful to reflect on a few different methods we've tried and explain how we have now moved to no marking in books.
One of the first ways we marked when I joined the department was to highlight students' written work. We had one colour for everything that was correct (yellow) and another for any errors (pink). This was great for those students who made few errors, but utterly demoralising for those with a lot! After a while, I chose to only highlight errors, and only those which I thought were the biggest errors. Students' response was to correct their errors in green pen by annotating their text. However, as you can imagine, they didn't know how to correct them, so the process took a long time as they asked what they needed to do. They didn't get the chance to improve their knowledge, just that piece of writing.
We've also explored the WWW and EBI route. Writing comments in students' books (or using stickers) to try and motivate them through praise and ensure they improved their writing by using more connectives or writing in the third person for example. These comments on reflection were unhelpful. They didn't help the student improve their language skills, they just forced them to add something else and not always successfully. We were encouraged to check their corrections. Double marking. I can't ever imagine asking my team to do this now!
Comparative marking is something we've also explored, but felt it did nothing but rank order students in a class. While this process can be useful when moderating assessments, it's not something we found useful when trying to improve proficiency in a language.
Whole class feedback is another way to provide comments to a class without marking every individual book. Take a sample, create a document that highlights who was very successful, what errors were commonly made throughout the class and how pieces could be improved. Then you give them time to improve their piece of work, DIT or DIRT it has been called.
All of these methods focus on improving a piece of work, and I think it misses the point. Feedback at every point to support students is key. We must focus on improving the student, not the work. Improving pronunciation first and foremost is important for us, phonological processing helps even the weakest students find success. We speak out loud every lesson. We refer to a set of rules in French that are displayed for students to refer to constantly. When they say a word wrong we model how to say it correctly, then later in the lesson we might ask them to say it again, and even as they walk into the classroom the next lesson (if our memory is working well!). We have changed our curriculum and resources to ensure that we don't move on to writing until students have had enough time to thoroughly process the structures and vocabulary we have taught. Once they have mastered the vocabulary, through verbal activities and reading and listening tasks designed to flood them with the target language, only then do we ask them to write. By this point, they are ready to create excellent work. Sure, there might be some spelling errors or the odd omitted word but as they write we circulate ("live marking") and point out where they may need to correct something, questioning them to check for understanding. They are, by and large, successful at this point. There is no need to put any red pen in their books.
I would like to highlight that writing is only a quarter of what we do in languages. Sometimes this is not considered when we are being asked to write feedback policies. There are many lessons during the year where we do nothing but speak the entire lesson. This deliberate practice mirrors natural language acquisition and doesn't focus on conjugating verbs in their full paradigm (we never do this, by the way!) but rather focuses on repeating chunks over and over, with and without support, using substitute words to expand vocabulary. We use mini-whiteboards every single lesson without fail, this is where students feel confident to make their mistakes because they can erase and try again following our feedback. This positive culture of error through supportive feedback is what improves language skills.
I also advocate shunning book looks in favour of inviting staff to visit my classroom to listen to the feedback I give and watch and hear the students improve. This has much more impact than checking to see if there is red pen in their books. I also love the feedback that comes from these observations, sometimes a non-specialist notices a way I can improve my feedback and this is always welcomed and reflections often lead to a more efficient way of working.
I think it's important to note that we do occasionally take a sample of books to check a piece of work. If there are any common misconceptions we then dedicate some time to practising this rule or vocabulary over the next few lessons. The focus is always to improve the student not the work and they are motivated because they feel success quickly.
