Written Corrective Feedback

Written corrective feedback. Form vs meaning.

Students do not often write for pleasure, but as requirement in their academic life. As well as for native speakers, for ESL learners writing is a demanding concern. Students, who learn English, learn not only to comprehend audio or texts but also to produce pieces of writing to communicate and support ideas. Therefore, managing writing skills has become very important as part of the management of academic skills. Corrective feedback is considered one important tool in the writing process. For teachers providing feedback is a tough task and for students it is a constant concern as it is meant to help them improve in their productive skills. This literature considers types of feedback, efficacy measured

In other cases, corrective feedback is aimed at helping students reach accuracy and complexity in their writings. (Sheppard, 1992)studied the efficacy of two types of response to student’s written tasks. The objective was to see how the types of feedback influence the accuracy and complexity of students writing. The author made an experiment with 26 students who were divided into two groups, and were treated differently with respect of their tasks. The groups were pre tested for general reading comprehension and grammatical knowledge. They both were given a 35 hours of instruction where they had to write similar tasks. The way feedback delivery made the difference. Group A had feedback based on grammar mistakes. Their mistakes were highlighted at the margin of the paper and then, the conference with the teacher was based on them. On the other hand, group B’s feedback was based on meaning which included a clarification question about what the person tried to say. Likewise, the conference with the teacher was meaning centered. The results showed that Group B improved significantly in verb accuracy and punctuation. Group A also improved in verb accuracy but by the end of the course, they were using fewer complex sentences because they considered them difficult. The researcher concluded that students whose feedback was based on communicative formulations learned

(Semke, 1984) study demonstrated that feedback comments oriented on meaning not only benefited students proficiency but commitment to learning independently and their confidence to perform tasks honestly. (Sheppard, 1992) research described grammar corrective feedback as it discouraged students of using complex structures and did not benefited their writing accuracy either. Finally, as shown in (Chen et al., 2016), students’ most preferred type of feedback was meaning focused as they considered it most effective in fostering their writing skills. Comparing the studies, there is a contradiction to note. The first study claims that corrections do not increase writing accuracy, however in (Sheppard, 1992) this result is contradicted by the evidence that Group A increased significally in verb accuracy yet it was not more than group B. These contradictions may result from the method used to address errors. On the other hand, the third study made clear that grammar corrections were the least preferred type of feedback by students as they considered ineffective. Consequently, there is still the question whether teachers should or not leave form corrective feedback aside. Considering that the three studies were done in university settings, it is valuable to question whether the results can be generalized in high school environments where the amount of writing