How Effective are Students’ Self-Editing Endeavours? – Evidence from L2 Writing Tasks

Abstract

Assessment in many cases in higher education involves essay writing and the submission of one draft only. Such assessment presupposes that students can self-edit effectively before submitting the essay. This article reports the self-editing endeavours of ten students in two writing tasks. Instruction in self-editing did not minimize errors in both tasks each student submitted. Since self-editing involves all the deliberate efforts of a responsible active agent in text creation, we attribute this result to the novice writers’ failure to position themselves as knowledge creators; or as participants; and coresearchers. Although writing instruction helps in eventually producing self-editing writers, we suggest that writing skills be taught as discipline-specific discourse practices rather than as autonomous skills. We recommend that the role of additional error feedback mechanisms namely peers, the lecturer, and the computer be increased and that assessment be more reflective of writing as a process whenever possible.