The Use of Models as a Form of Written Feedback to Secondary School Pupils of English

Abstract

The present study investigated how noticing is related to composing and subsequent feedback processing in individual and collaborative EFL writing. Participants were Spanish secondary school pupils at a lowintermediate proficiency level who completed a three-stage writing task that included writing a picture-based story (Stage 1), comparing their written texts with two native-speaker models (Stage 2), and attempting subsequent revisions (Stage 3). The results indicate that the students noticed mainly lexical problems at the writing stage but could only find a few solutions to those problems in the models provided. However, the comparison with the models allowed them, especially those who wrote collaborativelly, to notice a large number of features related to the content of the pictures and the linguistic means used to express that content. They were also found to incorporate a reasonable number in subsequent revisions. A number of implications from these findings for research and pedagogy are suggested. KEYWORDS:noticing, written feedback, composing, second language writing, models, collaborative writing, second language acquisition. RESUMEN EN ESPAÑOLEl objetivo de este estudio es investigar la relación entre atención, escritura y feedback durante la redacción individual y colaborativa de textos en inglés como lengua extranjera. Los participantes eran alumnos españoles de enseñanza secundaria con nivel de competencia intermedio-bajo que completaron una tarea de redacción en tres etapas: escritura de una narración a partir de unos dibujos (Etapa 1), comparación de los textos escritos con dos modelos escritos por hablantes nativos (etapa 2) y revisión posterior de los textos originales (etapa 3). Los resultados indican que los estudiantes repararon en errores principalmente de tipo léxico durante la escritura de la narración, pero que sólo pudieron encontrar unas pocas soluciones a esos problemas en los modelos proporcionados. Sin embargo, la comparación con los modelos les permitió, especialmente a los que trabajaban en colaboración, percatarse de un amplio número de elementos relacionados con el contenido de los dibujos y los medios lingüísticos utilizados para expresar tales contenidos, así como incorporar un número razonable de estos elementos en las revisiones posteriores. De acuerdo con estos resultados, se sugieren diversas implicaciones para la docencia y la investigación. PALABRAS CLAVEAtención, corrección de trabajos escritos, composición por escrito, redacción en segundas lenguas, modelos, redacción colaborativa, adquisición de segundas lenguas

The Use of Models as Written Corrective Feedback in English as a Foreign Language (EFL)Writing

“…Nevertheless, it should be noted that during the comparison stage, learners also noticed new gaps in their original output and that, indeed, increased attention was paid to the content of the texts and their expression. These results are in line with Hanaoka (2007) and Martínez Esteban and Roca de Larios (2010) and indicate the useful role of models to promote noticing and to diversify participants’ concerns.…”

“…This study was replicated by Martínez Esteban and Roca de Larios (2010), who investigated the role of models in individual and collaborative EFL writing. The participants were 17 Spanish secondary school pupils at a low-intermediate proficiency level who completed a three-stage writing task.…”

Child task-supported interaction in the Spanish EFL setting. Research and challenges

“…Besides, none of the studies assessed whether the LREs generated in the children's interaction were transferred to the written product. Also, although a number of previous studies has looked into the effects of different types on written corrective feedback (CF) in collaborative writing tasks with adult or adolescent learners (García Mayo & Loidi Labandibar, 2017;Hanaoka, 2006;Martínez Esteban & Roca de Larios, 2010;Yang & Zhang, 2010) research on how primary school children collaborate in writing and benefit from CF types such as models and reformulation is basically non-existent in the EFL context.…”

Models as written corrective feedback: Effects on young L2 learners’ fluency in digital writing from product and process perspectives

“…Past research with models has examined adults (Hanaoka, 2007), adolescents (García-Mayo & Labandibar, 2017;Kang, 2020;Martínez-Esteban &Roca de Larios, 2010), andchildren (Cánovas Guirao, 2018;Cánovas Guirao et al, 2015;Coyle et al, 2018;Lázaro-Ibarrola, 2021;Luquin & García-Mayo, 2021;Roothooft et al, 2022). Models have been implemented in a three-stage writing sequence: 1) a writing stage where participants are also pushed to notice the linguistic features they cannot express or have difficulties with (problematic features noticed); 2) a comparison stage of their own texts with a model text; and 3) a rewriting stage where participants try to include the features noticed in the previous stage into their own texts.…”