Responding to sentence-level errors in writing

The debate between Truscott (1996, 1999) and Ferris (1999) on responding to student errors in writing underscores how difficult this issue is for writing teachers. Conventionally, pedagogies have looked at errors separately from principles of text construction. From an interlanguage perspective, we argue that many perplexing errors are the result of the interaction between developing linguistic competence and basic principles of ordering information in texts which learners already know. We show how this interaction results in errors at the sentence-level. These insights are applied to published comments and corrections of sentence-level errors in student writing. Based on the interlanguage perspective we propose, our analysis of these comments and corrections shows how teachers may misinterpret a learner's text. The framework we propose situates students' sentence-level errors within their developing skill in constructing target-like texts and provides teachers with another perspective on such errors. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science Inc. All rights reserved.