I find laziness is the actual mother of invention, and when one day I decided that I couldn’t be bothered marking T for tense and P for preposition on my students’ work, I never ever went back. Now it’s:
____________________ = a mistake, e.g. grammar, wrong word, spelling or punctuation.
? = something I actually wasn’t quite sure of the meaning of (nicely pointing out that the ones above I did at least understand)
/ = add a word, // = add two words, etc
/ = new paragraph
a tick = good
and various kinds of arrows show problems with word order that can’t be shown by a simple underline.
And that’s it. Quicker and easier for me, and quicker and easier for my students to understand. In fact, no longer a code at all (unless your students are East Asian and think that a tick means that it is wrong). It also leaves room for the code they really do need, which is the phonemic script, and is closer to what they will be doing when they edit themselves. After all, how many students think “I’m sure I’ve made a mistake with punctuation/ spelling/ tenses/ a wrong word, but I’m just not sure what it should be”? None, but that is the situation you would be training them for by covering their written work with a collection of letters.
If your CELTA tutor tells you otherwise, tell them that I told you that you should tell them that they are wrong. And they are.
TEFLtastic 
OK boys and girls, here’s what you need to do. Are you reading carefully? Right, remember this…
‘Use a system that your students understand.’
If that’s too much to take in all at one time, come back and read it again later.
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Thanks Adam, nice summary
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When I was teaching a fair amount of writing, I thought that any marking code tended to result in unnatural, almost-English sentences no matter how many symbols I included. So instead, I would underline the three most unnatural or plain wrong sentences, and rewrite them in natural English.
This was certainly a system based on laziness, though a big part of me felt that most students didn’t really benefit from (or possibly even look at) all those symbols anyway.
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Here’s a memorable misunderstanding of a teacher’s ‘be specific’ comment:
‘Two of the biggest causes of global warming be specific are man made and natural causes.’
Can you guess what the student did?
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I am in favour of a correction code used with the following criteria:
1. Introduce it gradually so students learn more symbols as they progress through the levels.
2. Rather than “covering their written work with a collection of letters”, focus on the errors made with the target language or errors common to the student (e.g. S/V agreement or articles).
3. Make it an active rather than passive process – set aside some class time for students to correct their errors or ask the teacher if they can’t arrive at an answer. This creates a culture of responding to the code.
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Hi Rebecca
All good points, but there is no need to use a code to do any of those things. Just underline their mistakes and let them correct them, coming to you for help if they can’t (which I also usually do in class). What does adding T for tense or any other letter at all add to that?
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Another bit of silly DIPpiness. Nice in theory – but nearly useless in practical teaching.
I don’t think I EVER used the code to mark written work. I just underlined errors and wrote comments at the end.
Students seemed to want me to rewrite their rough draft or just to tell them it was IELTS level 6 or whatever.
I suppose when they get to uni in OZ or wherever they’re just gonna use google or get their boyfriend/girlfriend to write their essays for them….
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Love the expression DIPpiness.
Thank goodness IELTS have now banned examiners from giving their students grades and hidden the marking criteria from the rest of us, because I would refuse to give them a mark anyway but now I have a good excuse. How exactly do they think knowing their grade is going to help them improve??
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