The traditional method of responding to ESL students' written composition tends to stress linguistic accuracy, requiring the correction, usually by the teacher, of discrete grammatical items at the sentence level. Studies by In their study, Robb, Ross and Shortreed (1986) found that direct methods of feedback did not tend to produce results commensurate with the amount of effort required of the instructor to draw students' attention to surface errors, and that highly detailed feedback on sentence-level errors was not worth the instructors' time and effort. Although it appears that there is no consensus on how teachers should best react to student writing, or at what stage in the composing process they should provide feedback on students' mechanical errors, Krashen (1984) recommended delaying corrective feedback on errors until the final stage of editing. Krashen's suggestion reflects a growing understanding among researchers and teachers that writing involves producing a text that evolves over time. This has concomitantly resulted in a new and fresh approach for responding to student writing, a two-phase response, with the initial focus on content, delaying feedback on mechanical errors until "the work-in-progress" is fully shaped and becomes a finished product. This staggered and discriminate feedback fosters a more realistic and positive attitude towards rewriting, which is thus separated into two distinct and sequential tasks, viz. revision for content/meaning and editing for form/mechanics. Not only is revision differentiated from editing, but it is also prioritized over editing, thus reflecting and reinforcing that language, be it spoken or written, is primarily a communicative tool; written composition is organized communication. How is this response to writing more realistic? In responding first to the message/content, rather than to the form, teachers are showing cognizance of research which reveals that rewriting is an important part of the IN THE CLASSROOM/EN CLASSE 6
