Languages are notorious for their heavy marking load. Frequent practice is essential and students need feedback on their performance at regular intervals. However, if you are teaching several language modules, the burden can soon become considerable, especially at advanced levels. The following suggestions might help to keep you sane:

• Ask yourself if every piece of homework is essential: if the module allows it, reduce the number of homework tasks to be handed in and find other ways to provide feedback.
• Get students to swap and mark each other's work, especially basic or mechanical grammar exercises. This may smack of primary school practice, but students will readily accept it if you do not do it too often and you ensure everyone has actually done the work (otherwise resentment and cynicism can spread rapidly). Indeed there is growing research evidence that improved learning results from the experience of peer marking (see also section 13.3.2).
• With translations that students have done to a standard for you to mark, you could occasionally put a model version on the OHP and work through it with the group.
• Again with translations, get students to do a first draft; use part of a class to discuss these drafts as a group and then have students do a second draft: the inevitably more accurate second version will be less time-consuming to mark.
• Instead of setting two essays or two translations and marking them both in the same detailed way, get students to do a first draft; look through this quickly, underlining but not correcting problem areas; then ask students to review their errors and do a second draft which again will be more accurate and therefore cost you less time. This is not just skimping on effort; there are good pedagogical reasons for doing this (see Module 9, section 9.3.4 on writing skills, and Module 11 on translation, in particular section 11.3.2.2.)
• Reduce the length of exercises. Do students need to translate a whole passage every time or will, on occasions, written translation of key sentences or paragraphs, allied to thorough preparation of the rest of the text, be sufficient? Or can essay lengths be reduced occasionally?
• Use tick-box criteria grids (see Appendix 1 and Appendix 2) to allow quick feedback on the most common or typical features of a task, and use detailed comments to address more complex or individualized issues.
• Consider e-mail feedback: this allows comments you are likely to write on numerous pieces of work to be cut and pasted into messages.
• With exams, mark each question for the whole cohort in turn (eg all the Question 1 answers first) as this will mean you become familiar with the relevant mark scheme more quickly. It will also mean you are likely to mark that question more consistently.

It is sometimes suggested that using self- and peer assessment are ways to reduce the marking burden. In fact, as sections 13.3.1 and 13.3.2 show, if they are done properly this is rarely the case.

We should not forget that assessment can also be a burden to students, as the following two extracts illustrate. How would you respond to the concerns of these two students?

Student voice 1

Student voice 2

Click on 'Commentary' for feedback.