Since a teachers response on a students paper is potentially an influential text in a writing class,we need to examine our practices carefully. Research on teacher response to writing provides help on the issues of where to write comments on students papers,whether to correct or indicate the location of errors, and, most important of all,how necessary it is to assign a follow up activity to the given feedback. On the issue of whether it is best to write comments at the end of an essay,in the margins,or between the lines,Stiff and Bata have found that where we put comments have no effect on the writing of college freshmen. If we worry about whether to correct errors or simply to indicate their locations.it is probably better to do the latter,not only because it is less time consuming,but also because indication of errors improve accuracy just as much as correction. In addition,students report only 'making a mental note'of teachers comments,which is tantamount to saying that they glance briefly at a paper a teacher spent half an hour marking and then they put it away. There is another reason not to spend a long time on correction. Teachers can significantly misread students intentions and rewrite sentences according to the 'ideal texts'that they hold in their heads. To make certain that the students ideas are being communicated accurately.it is essential to put the burden of rewriting and editing back on the students. Just as important as the corrections the teacher writes on the students papers are the tasks assigned after the papers are returned to the students. Lees(1988)proposes seven modes of commenting on students papers:correcting,emoting,describing,suggesting, questioning, reminding,and assigning. While the first three put the burden on the teacher,the next three try to shift the burden to the student. Only assigning,creating another assignment based on what a student has written,provides a way to discover how much of that burden the student has taken. Some second language research studies stress frequent opportunities for writing and rewriting as an important tool to improve both content and accuracy. Fathman and Whalley.in their studies of types of written feedback and its effects on revision, conclude .'all students, irrespective of the kind of feedback they received from the teacher,improved the content of their compositions when they rewrite them'. In a study of students drafts in a University of New York classroom.it is found that the number of errors the students made per T-unit decreases by 20% on a second draft,even when the teachers response included no explicit correction of errors. The passage discusses the following issues EXCEPT____.