Responding to Student Writing

Abstract

Because writing teachers invest so much time responding to student writing and because these responses reveal the assumptions teachers hold about writing, L1 writing researchers have investigated how composition teachers respond to their students' texts. These investigations have revealed that teachers respond to most writing as if it were a final draft, thus reinforcing an extremely constricted notion of composing. Their comments often reflect the application of a single ideal standard rather than criteria that take into account how composing constraints can affect writing performance. Furthermore, teachers' marks and comments usually take the form of abstract and vague prescriptions and directives that students find difficult to interpret. A study was undertaken to examine ESL teachers' responses to student writing. The findings suggest that ESL composition teachers make similar types of comments and are even more concerned with language‐specific errors and problems. The marks and comments are often confusing, arbitrary, and inaccessible. In addition, ESL teachers, like their native‐language counterparts, rarely seem to expect students to revise the text beyond the surface level. Such responses to texts give students a very limited and limiting notion of writing, for they fail to provide students with the understanding that writing involves producing a text that evolves over time. Teachers therefore need to develop more appropriate responses for commenting on student writing. They need to facilitate revision by responding to writing as work in progress rather than judging it as a finished product.

Feedback on the Feedback: Sociocultural Interpretation of Saudi ESL Learners’ Opinions about Writing Feedback

“…Other studies revealed that students appreciated positive feedback (Cohen & Cavalcanti, 1990) over negative comments that they found to be frustrating (Ferris, 1995). The question of the significance of student-teacher conferences was also discussed (Arndt, 1993;Zamel, 1985). Other researchers (Cathcart & Olsen, 1976;Ferris, 1995;Lee, 2005;Radecki & Swales, 1988) mentioned that L2 learners preferred large amounts of feedback as opposed to occasional or selective feedback.…”

“…The study also found that teacher feedback is confusing, frustrating, and ultimately ineffective (Sommers, 1982;Zamel, 1985;Conners & Lunsford, 1993). Researchers have suggested that students might misunderstand the feedback (Ferris, 1995;Conrad & Goldstein, 1999) or might be unable to successfully generate the correct revisions.…”

An Empirical Study on the Projection of Specificity in the Usage of Modifiers in Chinese College EFL Writing

“…But some researchers (Jia, 1998;Li, 2000) claim that product approach is not compatible with current EFL learning, being proved not effective in both teaching and writing (Cai, 2002;Zhang, 1993;Li, 2000). Thus, they advocates to adopt process approach which has been wildly applied in western countries for a long time (Raimes, 1983;Zamel, 1985;Hedge, 1988;White & Arndt, 1991). It emphases cooperation among learners and their writing process, which should be consisted by three steps: pre-writing, drafting and revision (Luo & Li, 2003).…”

Iranian English Teachers’ Perception over Applying Different Feedbacks in Writing

“…Robb, Ross, & Shortreed, 1986;Semke, 1984;Zamel, 1985). Truscott (1996) argued that all forms of error correction in L2 writing classes should be abandoned because correction is not only unhelpful but also harmful in the development of student writing ability.…”

“…Although most of the experimental studies on L2 written feedback have focused on the issue of error correction (Bitchener, 2008;Bitchener & Knoch, 2009a, 2009bBitchener, Young, & Cameron, 2005;Ferris, 1999;Zamel, 1985), some descriptive studies have investigated teacher written feedback from the viewpoints of teachers and students. Most descriptive studies conducted in the domain of L2 written feedback have been predominantly designed to investigate student perceptions on teacher feedback.…”