Chinese composition teachers' commentary styles and patterns in a tablet-based marking environment

Abstract

This paper is a preliminary study on the general marking process of Chinese writing teachers in a tablet-based marking platform, which focuses on identifying the predominant commentary styles and patterns of the Chinese writing teachers on a newly developed tablet-based marking platform. Two participating teachers were recruited to take part in an on-site experiment in which they were requested to mark four compositions written by their students on a tablet-based marking platform. It is found that one of the participants was overgeneric in his overall comments and both of them tended to emphasize evaluation over instruction in their marking. We try to account for these findings in terms of their narrow conception of the role of teachers in composition marking merely as "proofreaders", "evaluators" and "judges", and propose the need to promote a more comprehensive notion of writing teachers. © 2014 Springer International Publishing.