Quebec literature often plays with the gap between everyday spoken French and the formal register taught in classrooms. Michel Tremblay is closely associated with this tension, and students writing about Bonbons Assortis frequently have to discuss how language itself shapes a story. Teachers grading these essays face a double task: judging the student's analysis of language while also judging the student's own use of it.

Confusing those two tasks leads to unfair scoring. A student might write a perceptive paragraph about how a character's speech signals social background and still make agreement errors in the same paragraph. If the rubric combines both into a single score, the strong analysis is punished by the surface mistakes and the student receives no clear signal about which skill needs work.

Separating these dimensions on the rubric solves most of the problem. One row can address how well the student interprets language in the text, while another addresses accuracy and register in the student's own writing. Each row gets its own descriptors, so a teacher can reward insight and still hold the student to the course's standards for formal writing.

Teaching Students When Register Is a Choice

A frequent error in essays on texts with spoken-style language is that students let the text's informality leak into their own analysis. Quoting a colloquial line is entirely appropriate, but the surrounding commentary should return to an academic register. Teachers can address this by showing a before-and-after example in which the quotation stays as written and the explanation is polished.

• Quotations stay faithful to the text, including its spoken features
• Commentary around quotations uses the formal register expected in class
• Terms such as register or dialect are used precisely and explained
• Claims about social meaning are tied to specific language in the story
• Students avoid judging a way of speaking as simply right or wrong

Handling Sensitive Language Questions

Discussions of dialect and class can touch real feelings, particularly in classrooms where students speak varied forms of French or other languages at home. Feedback should treat every way of speaking as worthy of analysis and focus on what the language does within the story. A comment that praises a student's close reading of a character's speech reinforces that this kind of attention is valued.

Teachers should also be careful about corrections that imply one variety is inferior. When marking a student's own writing, explain that the course requires a particular register for academic essays, which is a convention rather than a moral judgment. This framing keeps correction clear while preserving the student's confidence in their own linguistic background.

Grading Language Accuracy Efficiently

Marking every error on every paper is slow and often counterproductive, since students tend to fix the highlighted words without understanding the pattern behind them. A more efficient approach is to identify the two or three error types that recur in each paper and comment on those patterns. Students learn more from a clear explanation of a repeated mistake than from a page covered in corrections.

Keeping a running list of common errors for the class helps with both feedback and planning. When the same agreement or verb tense issue appears in fifteen essays, a brief class review will do more good than fifteen separate comments. This approach respects your time and gives students shared language for talking about their writing.

Building a Fair Scoring Habit

Decide before grading how many points language accuracy is worth and what a typical score at each level looks like. Having a concrete picture of a paper with occasional errors versus one with frequent errors keeps your scoring stable. Without it, harsh readers and generous readers can produce very different grades for the same essay.

Revisit your descriptors after each assignment to see whether they matched what actually appeared in student work. If most papers cluster in one band, the descriptors may not distinguish well between levels. Small adjustments each term gradually produce a rubric that reflects real student writing and supports clearer, more useful feedback.