This study contrasts the effects of two distinct ways of respon ding to a student essay: discrete-item attention to form and holistic feedback on meaning. In examining the before- and after-essays of a linguistically diverse group of 26 college freshmen, it shows that the use of a holistic response is likely to increase a student's awareness of sentence boundaries more than the alternative. In other words, responding to content results in improvements in grammatical accu racy. General implications are also addressed.
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