Teachers grade papers, sometimes briefly, but more often with plenty of underlining, cross-outs, and comments written between the lines, in the margins, at the top of the page, or at the end. They are committed to providing detailed feedback, even when the work is not graded.
Like report cards, these evaluations have marked our educational journey and are part of our memories as students: words of encouragement, advice, questions—but sometimes also reprimands and other painful moments—such as dictations covered in red ink with disastrous grades, and comments like “poorly spoken,” “pointless,” or “unworthy of a6thgrader.”
Docimology—the study of exam questions and, in particular, grading systems—has clearly highlighted the difficulties involved in assessing students’ work, the biases at play, and the factors contributing to discrepancies. Research on teachers’ annotations on exam papers provides additional insights. It prompts us to examine an everyday practice that is, in fact, not as straightforward as it seems. It invites us to reflect on how teachers interpret their students’ writing and how students interpret the marks left by their teachers on their papers.
Grading exams: For whom, and for what purpose?
In written production activities, the issue of annotations has been closely studied, particularly in the E-Calm research project, which brings together school writings from first grade through college, including texts annotated by teachers and successive versions of the same text rewritten by the student. One of the key research questions regarding this corpus was to determine to what extent students take teachers’ annotations into account when revising their texts. The observations were supplemented by interviews with students and teachers.
A comparison of drafts that required multiple writing sessions (versions 1 and 2 of the texts) shows that 60% of the teacher’s interventions elicit a response from the student, but most of these responses consist of pointing out errors in incorrect or missing graphemes (such as the plural marker in agreement sequences).
Overall, students make few changes to their texts based on the annotations, and when they do, the changes are superficial and relatively mechanical. In interviews conducted with about twenty6th-and9th-grade students, they also stated that they don’t really look at the annotations.
Annotations may be most useful to teachers. At the level of an individual test, they allow teachers to highlight shortcomings or successes, and at the level of a class assignment, they help teachers gauge where students stand. They thus function as a measurement tool, and in interviews, teachers say they make these annotations as they go through the text and view them as a tool for their teaching practice.
Their observations will help them plan the next steps in their instruction. For example, if a teacher notices difficulties with how students introduce dialogues, they will include this as a point in their preparation for the group review and will plan a session focused on this issue.
Some teachers say they are tempted to stop providing comments because what matters most to them is discussing the assignment with students afterward and having them revise whatever needs revising. And yet, they continue to do so. The interviews highlight the weight of this tradition: What would their colleagues say? What would parents think if the papers were returned without comments?
The act of annotation is thus characterized by a certain degree of inertia. Writing assignments dating from 1907 to 1976 were analyzed. One significant difference is that comments on morality, which were common in the first half ofthe 20thcentury, gradually disappeared. Apart from that, the practice remains unchanged, and fromthe 19thcentury to the present, annotations in students’ essays have primarily concerned adherence to linguistic norms: students must write correct French.
The Central Role of Spelling in Corrections
When correcting a student’s writing, a teacher has a wide variety of marking symbols at their disposal, which vary greatly when reviewing corrected papers. For example, omitting the plural marker in a noun phrase can be addressed in various ways: underlining the end of the word to highlight the absence of the -s, adding the -s, writing a comment in the margin (with or without additional underlining), in different forms (an instruction to the student such as “Add the plural marker here,” a question such as “Didn’t you forget a plural marker here?”, a statement such as “The plural marker is missing”), a code using abbreviations (“orth” for “spelling,” “acc” for “agreement”), etc.
In addition to this variety of marks left in the text, there is also a variety of pedagogical intentions: adding an -s is not the same as underlining the word in question. In the first case, the teacher corrects the error to bring it into line with the standard. In the second case, the teacher encourages the student to identify the error or even correct it.
One might assume that each mark corresponds to a clear intention and that teachers fall into one of the two scenarios presented: either they correct their students’ writing in the strict sense, or they point out its shortcomings, starting with spelling errors. However, a review of corrected papers shows that marks are sometimes used haphazardly, and within a single corrected text, one can find several different marks for the same repeated error.
So far, we’ve used spelling as an example. This is no coincidence, as it’s the aspect teachers focus on most when grading students’ essays. Spelling errors jump out at the reader, who takes on the same role as a spell-checker in word-processing software. However, a text cannot be reduced to an orderly sequence of correctly spelled words.
Writing a text is a complex process that involves taking several factors into account. It is the work of a writer who engages their emotions and must simultaneously manage the overall project as well as syntactic, lexical, enunciative, and stylistic choices, the flow of ideas, and the coherence of the text, among other things.
The systematic focus on spelling (which is only one aspect of writing) raises questions. What is a student supposed to understand when they try to employ stylistic and rhetorical devices, yet the only error noted on their paper is an incorrect agreement of the past participle? This calls into question the entire approach to writing, and the attention given to other textual aspects is diminished.
How to Encourage a Genuine Rewriting of Texts
It is important to reflect on the concept of rewriting. Curriculum guidelines emphasize the ability to “improve a text—particularly its spelling—by following instructions.” In the classroom, the tendency is to take a fairly linear approach to the writing process: planning, drafting, and revising.
Another way to think about rewriting, however, is to see it as an opportunity for a thorough overhaul: you revisit your original goals, rework your text beyond superficial revisions, or even rewrite it in the sense of producing a new text.
Focusing solely on correcting spelling prevents the substance of the text—the story being told and the ideas—from evolving. For young writers, going through their teachers’ comments one by one and incorporating them into a new version could get in the way of a true rewrite—that is, reworking the project as a whole.
Research agrees on the importance of learning to read students’ texts differently—to view them as writing attempts and to see them as the student’s effort to construct meaning. Feedback on the text needs to be prioritized: what is the main focus of the assigned exercise? It is the pact between reader and author that must thus be clarified. Spelling would then come toward the end, much like when a writer corrects the final typos in their text.
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Initiatives such as author circles are also very interesting because they allow students to discuss together what makes a text work well or not so well.
For students, the goal is not merely to produce a well-written text that meets language standards. It is to learn how to write—that is, to be able to draw on their experiences and gradually develop strategies that will enable them to know how to produce various types of texts independently.
