How Deeply Do Second Language Learners Process Written Corrective Feedback? Insights Gained From Think‐Alouds

Abstract

This research compares how second language learners process two types of written feedback: reformulation and direct correction. On a two‐stage composition‐and‐comparison task, 22 adult learners of English as a second language taking an academic writing course at a large midwestern U.S. university participated in a repeated‐measures study in which they wrote two argumentative essays and received feedback in the form of reformulation on one and direct correction on the other in counterbalanced fashion. During the comparison stage for each essay, learners completed think‐alouds, which were used to gauge how they processed the two types of feedback. The findings reveal that learners processed sentential and paragraph‐level errors more deeply but overlooked surface‐level errors when they received reformulation as feedback; the reverse was the case when they received direct correction. Results therefore suggest that there may not be a one‐size‐fits‐all answer for written corrective feedback but that different errors respond to feedback differently.

Assessing the effect of giving and receiving written corrective feedback on improving L2 writing accuracy: does giving and receiving feedback have fair mutual benefit?

“…Yet, there is still no conclusive evidence concerning the efficacy of specific feedback strategies in improving second language (L2) learners' writing accuracy. L2 researchers, to date, have investigated the effect of feedback on L2 learners' writing ability from different perspectives, including focused and unfocused feedback (e.g., Bitchener & Knoch, 2009;Nemati, Alavi, & Mohebbi, 2019), direct and indirect feedback (Karim & Endley, 2019;Kim & Bowles, 2019), the feedback medium (Zhang, 2020), L2 learners and teachers' perceptions, preferences, needs, and practices in writing tasks (Bahrouni & Tuzlukova, 2019;Motallebzadeh, Kondori, & Kazemi, 2020;Nemati, Alavi, Mohebbi, & Masjedlou, 2017;Raza, 2019), and the source of feedback, namely teacher and/or peer (Ferris, 1995;Hyland, 2000;Miao, Badger, & Zhen, 2006;Peterson & Portier, 2014;Zhang & McEneaney, 2020). These studies and their inconclusive and somehow contradictory findings have given rise to a great deal of discussion on the value of feedback in developing writing accuracy.…”

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

“…With the assistance of these operations, learners can process the feedback at different depths, either high or low. For instance, reformulation, a form of written corrective feedback, might require higher cognitive engagement than direct corrections (Kim and Bowles, 2019) while it was found to be lower than the editing processing (Storch and Wigglesworth, 2010). The cognitive engagement was different in processing various feedback types.…”

College Ready or Not?

“…This may be especially useful in math courses, where the process of getting to the solution is just as important as the solution itself. A professor can "think out loud" with the students in a collaborative fashion and invite them to follow the steps needed to arrive at a solution (Kim & Bowles, 2019). Finally, providing students with visual examples of high quality student work completed in previous semesters can serve as another form of modeling that can greatly benefit ELL students.…”