TEACHERS WRITTEN FEEDBACK

ON STUDENT WRITING
FORM, FOCUS AND IMPACT

Abdelkrim Mabchour
amabchour5@gmail.com
 OUTLINE
Introduction
Teacher feedback in the literature
The study
Research questions
Research design
Findings
Evaluation
Recommendations
Conclusion
Introduction
 INTRODUCTION
[T]he teachers role is to help students develop
viable strategies for getting started (finding
topics, generating ideas and information,
focusing and planning structure and procedure),
for drafting (encouraging multiple drafts), for
revising (adding, deleting, modifying, and
encouraging ideas), and for editing (attending to
vocabulary, sentence structure, grammar and
mechanics) (Silva 1990:15)
Quotes from the literature:

1- Form
2- Focus
3- Impact
THE FORM
 teachers marks and comments usually
take the form of vague and abstract
prescriptions and directives that students
find difficult to interpret (Zamel 1985:79)
 When cues remain implicit, whether at the
conceptual, srtuctural, or sentential
level,[teachers comments] are often
misunderstood, misinterpreted and
unhelpful to students in their effort to
rethink the problems being addressed
(Ziv, cited in Zamel 1985:83)
THE FOCUS
 Teachers comments across language classes
and levels were reported to deal
primarily with grammarand mechanics.
Teachers apparently devoted considerably less
of their time to vocabulary, organization,and
content ( Cohen 1987:60)
 [the tendency] is to focus on surface-
level featuressuch as grammar and
mechanics, but little interest is attached to
content and organization (Oulbouch and
Zerhari 1994:33)
 comments are worded in such a way that it
is difficult for students to know what is the
most important problem in the text and what
problems are of lesser importance. No scale
of concern is offered to students, with the
result that a comment about an awkward
sentence is given weight equal to a comment
about organization and logic (Sommers
1984:163)
THE IMPACT
In a study by Robb, Ross and Shortreed
(1986), four groups of students
received grammar feedback only during
a writing course, but in varied forms
from one group to another. No
significant differences in writing
abilities were reported at the end of the
course
To sum up, the impact of teachers
feedback on students writing is
determined by the form it takes and the
aspects it focuses on. Failure to word a
comment appropriately and intelligibly
and/or to address the most important
aspects of writing will only be counter-
productive
THE STUDY
The research questions
1- What form(s) does teachers written
feedback take?
2- What aspects of students writing does
teachers written feedback focus on?
3- What impact does teachers written
feedback have on students rewrites?
The research design
 The research design

Subjects:
- 60 2nd -year qualifying- cycle students,
with roughly the same number of years
of formal exposure to English
- Three teachers of English who
graduated from the E.N.S
 The reasearch design
Stimulus topic.
Writing.Students were assigned the
following writing task:
By taking a position either for or against,
give your opinion whether married women,
in your society, should work or not. Be
sure to back up your opinion with specific
examples
(Adapted from Atkinson and Viramanathan, 1995:568)
 The reasearch design
Rewriting. Students in each class were
randomly split into two groups. One ( the
experimental group) received their
teachers written feedback on their writing.
The other (the control group) received no
feedback whatsoever. But both groups
had to rewrite their compositions
 The research design
Student questionnaire and teacher interview.
Based on the results of the analysis of the data
obtained from writing and rewriting, a
questionnaire was designed about the type of
feedback the students usually receive. A
structured interview was designed to to help
know more about the focus and impact of the
three teachers feedback on their students
writing
FINDINGS
 FINDINGS
(feedback modes)
The form of teachers feedback.

Three different responding modes were

observed. Surprisingly, each teacher
adopts one particular mode.
 FINDINGS
(feedback modes)
Locating
The teacher circles or underlines the wrong item,
adding arrows or other symbols , with no
specification
Example:
Students draft:
Its right for woman to work
Teachers feedback: Its right for woman to work
 FINDINGS
(feedback modes)
Labelling
The teacher uses a code (words or abbreviations)
to indicate in what way the item is wrong
Ss draft: because the children need to a satisfate
education in theire periothe of life
T feedback: because the children need to a satisfate
education in theire periothe of life. Ambiguous
 FINDINGS
(feedback modes)
Modifying
It takes different forms:
-crossing out a wrong item
-substituting a correct item for an incorrect
one
-supplying missing items
-rewording
 FINDINGS
(feedback modes)
Modifying
Examples:
1- S draft: she cant keep the children
look after
T feedback: she cant keep the children
 FINDINGS
(feedback modes)
Modifying
2- S draft: In my opinion whether married
women shouldnt work why?
T feedback:In my opinion whether married
should
women shouldnt work or not
why?
 FINDINGS
(teacher focus)
The three teachers, even with three different
feedback modes, almost invariably focus
on surface structure problems and rarely
show interest in other requirements of
good writing
 FINDINGS
(teacher focus)

Teachers comments focused mainly on

problems of spelling, agreement, wording,
punctuation, capitalization, conjunctions,
pronouns, articles and prepositions.
 FINDINGS
(teacher focus)
But the teachers also identified vocabulary
errors (almost 11% of the total errors
observed).
 FINDINGS
(teacher focus)

To sum up, the three teachers spent a long

time struggling with lower level
errors/problems and only rarely went
beyond the sentence boundaries. When
they did, their comments were often
vague, ambiguous, or counter-productive
 Evaluation
impact Least Most Most
mode effective intrusive balanced
locating

modifying

labelling
 Evaluation
The following examples tell how ineffective
the locating mode, as used by one
teacher, is:
1st draft: she stayed at home and to watch children

T feedback: she stayed at home and to watch children

2nd draft:she stayed at home and to watched children
 EVALUATION

1st draft: Because it is a lot of problems

T feedback: Because (it is) a lot of problem(s)

2nd draft: Because a lot of problems it is

 EVALUATION
An example from the student questionnaire
reveals the students failure to understand
this mode. To the question Do you
understand all the comments written by
your teacher? , some students gave
answers such as the following:
 EVALUATION

Trans. When he underlines
grammar/syntax errors
/-!!
Trans. -!!?-And such marks. Do they refer to
the empty space or to something else?
 EVALUATION
Modifying reflects a tendency in one of the
three teachers to appropriate the students
texts. An extreme example is the following:
 EVALUATION
2- S draft: In my opinion whether married
women shouldnt work why?
T feedback:In my opinion whether married
should
women shouldnt work or not
why?
 EVALUATION
In the rewrite, the student retained the
original structure. Reading the whole text
reveals that this resistance was justified.
Indeed the arguments in the students text
are all against womens work, a point that
he/she states explicitly and overtly from
the very beginning of his/her writing.
 EVALUATION
Labelling seems to be the most helpful
mode, mainly when dealing with
punctuation, agreement and spelling. The
only problem with this mode is that it is
less successful as it tries to deal with
errors beyond the sentence or with
ambiguous structures
 EVALUATION
(impact of feedback)
When the first and second drafts of the
experimental group were compared by an
independent judge, no significant
improvement was observed in the overall
quality of their texts.
 EVALUATION
What confirms the limited effect of the three
teachers feedback was the overall quality
of the students rewrites (second drafts).
Many errors identified by the teachers
either reappeared in the second drafts
(mainly those located) or were corrected
in a wrong way
 EVALUATION
But when the 1st and 2nd drafts of the control
group (who received no feedback at all)
were compared by the same independent
judge, there was in about one third of the
papers a significant change (such as
instances of elaboration and
reorganization of ideas) in the 2nd drafts
This suggests that teachers feedback can
(unintentionally, of course) labour against
its own declared goals and have a
restrictive impact on students
development.
 EVALUATION

Some writing problems that went

unnoticed
1- One-paragraph texts. Many texts were
only one paragraph.This suggests that
these students do not perceive the
paragraph as a rhetorical unit. Usually
there is a one-paragraph text for more
than one point/argument.
2- Lack of elaboration. Students in this
study tend to express an argument as one
or two sentences, failing to provide details
such as examples and counter-examples
or facts to illustrate a point.They think that
just saying it will carry the day
3- Rhetorical repetition. Many students
use the accumulative discourse instead of
the analytical discourse. They are usually
trapped into an invisible repetition as in the
following extracts:
She stays at home.and not working
RECOMMENDATIONS
 RECOMMENDATIONS
1- The need for a common guiding code
The fact that labelling was the most
balanced mode observed in this study
requires the setting of a shared code.
But a code that deals not only with surface
level aspects proper to product, but also
and more importantly with aspects of the
process facet of writing
 RECOMMENDATIONS
Such a code will be in the form of an
accompanying checklist, dealing with
content and organization. Such a checklist
will ask questions like the following:
 RECOMMENDATIONS

Planning
(suggested guiding questions)
1- What is the purpose of my writing?
2- What do I know about the topic?
3- What is the appropriate plan for this text?
 RECOMMENDATIONS

Revising
(suggested guiding questions)
4- Do I have to provide examples to illustrate this point?
5- What details do I have to add to make my point(s) less
vague/general?
6- Do I have to reformulate this point in order to make it clear?

7- Is my paragraph/text coherent?
8- Am I writing the same thing in more than one paragraph?
9- Did I meet the goal(s) I set at the beginning?
 RECOMMENDATIONS
2-The need for student training
At the language level. Students need a
reasonable degree of automaticity in
syntactic areas such as sentence
transformation,combining and embedding.
Such practice will hopefully alleviate the
linguistic burden of writing and shift
students concern to other, higher level
processes
 RECOMMENDATIONS
At the skill level. Students need activities
which will engage them into rhetorical and
organizational levels of writing. A teacher
may give students a paragraph which
needs modifying, supplementing or
reorganizing. He/she may also expose
students to written texts so that they can
experience their structure.
 RECOMMENDATIONS

The smallest unit of study at the skill level

should be the paragraph
 RECOMMENDATIONS
3- The need for a change in views
attitudes and practices.
We need to question our assumptions
about
what constitutes good writing. We still
equate good writing with error-free writing.
 CONCLUSION
[A]lternative pedagogies donot necessarily
mean a qualitative change in everyday
school practices. In order to make real
changes in classrooms , basic
assumptions about teacher-student work,
authority, control and knowledge have to be
examined and modified
Ulichny and Thomas-Gegeo (1989)
THANK YOU ALL