Exploring Supervisory Feedback Formulation on Academic Writing of Research Proposals and Postgraduates’ Responses to Feedback: A Case Study

Abstract

Despite the emphasis on effective supervisory feedback formulation on postgraduates’ academic writing, our understanding of effective feedback forms may not be comprehensive without mentoring students’ responses to feedback. Therefore, the current case study explores feedback formulation on research proposal writing and two postgraduates’ responses to feedback in a Malaysian university. Data were collected from written feedback, students’ commenting responses to feedback, their text revisions, and follow-up interviews. The feedback is formulated as directive, referential, and expressive, and it addresses issues related to content, organization, linguistic accuracy, and appropriateness in research proposal writing. The two postgraduates engaged in cognitive (e.g., confusion), metacognitive (e.g., reading feedback), and affective (e.g., appreciating feedback) responses to feedback. They integrated most of the feedback in revising their writing and made additional text revisions. Although this study is primarily qualitative in nature, simple descriptive quantitative measures were applied to the data to determine the prevalence of feedback forms, responding and revision patterns. The study provides useful suggestions for supervisory feedback practices.

ESL/EFL Learners' Responses to Teacher Written Feedback: Reviewing a Recent Decade of Empirical Studies

“…As Table 3 shows, more than 85% of the studies (N = 55) were conducted at the tertiary level including both English major and non-English major ESL/EFL learners; very few were in secondary and primary schools. In tertiary education, the participants in most of the reviewed studies were undergraduates (N = 45); few studies (N = 10) had postgraduates as their participants (Rivens Mompean, 2010;Storch and Wigglesworth, 2010;Mirzaee and Hasrati, 2014;Kim and Kim, 2017;Xu, 2017;Green, 2019;Zheng et al, 2020b;Anderson, 2021;Pitura, 2021;Saeed et al, 2021). The number of studies situated in China was 24.…”

“…Another case study, Storch and Wigglesworth (2010), investigated the effects of peer discussion on learners' engagement with TWF through the lens of SCT. The third case study, Saeed et al (2021), analyzed two female Malaysian postgraduates' behavioral responses (i.e., proposal writing revision) to supervisory feedback. Based on the sociocultural theory of learning, Kim and Emeliyanova (2021) tried to understood learners' engagement with teachers' indirect WCF in two different learning environments (i.e., collaborative revision and individual revision) and the influence of the environments on learners' writing accuracy.…”

“…Cognitive operations mentioned in the reviewed articles including conceptualizing on details, reasoning, memorizing, activating previous knowledge, clarifying, questioning, confirming, and justifying (Han and Hyland, 2015;Buckingham and Aktuǧ-Ekinci, 2017;Saeed et al, 2021). Meta-cognitive operations mainly concerned having planned steps to deal with teacher feedback, intentions and plans to make revisions, providing a correct form/response, informing of making a revision, prioritizing, evaluating, monitoring, letting it go and moving on (Han and Hyland, 2015;Zhang and Hyland, 2018;Zheng et al, 2020b;Saeed et al, 2021). With the assistance of these operations, learners can process the feedback at different depths, either high or low.…”

“…Feedback uptake in revision means the behavior of using feedback in revision and it varied with the types of TWF. Saeed et al (2021) discovered that expressive feedback, such as praise, was a typical example that required no effort in revision while directive feedback's uptake in revision was relatively much higher than expressive and inferential feedback. Indirect coded correction feedback was also found to elicit learners' more revision efforts in the error reduction and improvement of writing performance.…”

Power Relations in Academic Discourse: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Lecturer-Student Interrogation During Undergraduate Thesis Defense Sessions (Relasi Kuasa Dalam Wacana Akademik: Studi Wacana Kritis Interogasi Dosen-Mahasiswa Pada Ujian Skripsi Program Sarjana)

“…Previous studies have examined the feedback provided by lecturers to students during undergraduate thesis consultation (Bjerså et al, 2019), master's thesis consultation Neupane Bastola & Hu, 2021;Saeed et al, 2021;Zheng et al, 2020), and dissertation consultation (Basturkmen et al, 2014(Basturkmen et al, , 2014Hemer, 2012). The previous research findings covered a broad field of studies, including (1) linguistic aspects of supervisor feedback, (2) forms of appreciation, suggestions, and recommendations given by the supervisor, (3) directive, referential, and expressive pragmatic forms employed by the supervisor, (4) writing pedagogy, (5) the effect of the supervisor feedback on student motivation, and (6) corpus analysis on the feedback.…”