Commenting and Motivational Scaffolding

Justine Mack

Nancy Sommers “Responding to Student Writing” is very interesting because I have never really thought much about the comments teachers or professors wrote on my paper. I think it’s really cool that they did a specific study on how teacher’s comments affect a students writing. I found it even more interesting that they found that teachers write generic comments on all their students papers and some comments weren’t even relevant or made sense on certain papers. I completely agreed with Sommers when she discusses how the wording of some comments made it difficult to understand what to correct or what is most important to correct. I will admit throughout my academic career when a teacher or professor commented on my work I just fixed what they suggested needed fixing and didn’t look any further into it. I never thought that maybe they were taking away from my style. However, I have ran into assignments where I interpreted it a certain way and my interpretation didn’t match what the professor was asking so I changed the whole assignment to please the professor. I have written to the teacher or the professor rather than in my own style.

Jo Mackiewicz and Isabelle Thompson wrote the article “Motivational Scaffolding, Politeness and Writing Center Tutoring.” Within this article, they discuss the politeness theory in writing centers and motivational scaffolding. I am a strong supporter of scaffolding because I feel it really helps students learn if done the right way. Motivational scaffolding is when teachers or parents structure a task and motivates the student, child to participate in the task and sometimes performs those parts of the task that student, child can’t perform allowing the child to concentrate on what he or she is capable of doing. Some key aspects of motivational learning include praising when the student does something right, statements of encouragement or optimism about students’ possibilities for success in order to build their confidence and reduces stress, demonstrations of concern for students to show students that the tutoring environment is a caring environment, express sympathy and empathy if they are having difficulty on the task, and reinforcement of students feelings of ownership and control. Motivational scaffolding has been proven to be extremely successful. I also know from my personal experiences that motivational scaffolding has helped me a lot because it allows the teacher to aid in the process when needed but the student is responsible for majority of the work. Next they addressed politeness and motivation in the writing center. Positive Politeness strategies include things like tutors can give understanding and sympathy, tutors can notice and attend to students’ accomplishments or conditions, tutors can convey that they and the students are cooperators. Negative Politeness Strategies involve carrying out a speech act that threatens face, such as when tutor makes a suggestion or states a criticism- but simultaneously acknowledging the students want to be independent and free of imposition. I feel I see positive politeness strategies used more often than negative politeness strategies. I think it might be hard to use negative politeness strategies on people the tutor is not particularly comfortable with even though they are being polite about it. I personally just like positive politeness strategies because it helps boost confidence in tutees and being nice is my favorite thing to be!