Browsing by Subject "Think-aloud protocol (TAP) procedure"

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Open Access
EFL students' cognitive journey through the teacher's written feedback
(2006) Çağlar, Emel
This study was designed to investigate how much students understand and utilize the teacher’s written sentence, content, and discourse-level feedback, what strategies they employ in processing it, and how effectively students can relate the teacher’s responses to their texts. The study was conducted with 6 upper-intermediate level students and their writing teacher at Istanbul Technical University School of Foreign Languages. The data were collected through the students’ first and revised drafts, students’ and the teacher’s think-aloud protocols (TAPs), and interviews with the students. The results indicated that the students had problems understanding and interpreting the written teacher commentary when the teacher commented on all aspects of a composition in one draft such as sentence, content, and discourse, when the teacher used various ways to present her comments such as marginal, in-text, and final notes, when the teacher commented on each sentence-level error rather than to mark them selectively, and when the teacher was not clear and simple enough for students in the final notes. This study suggests implementing a multi-draft setting, in which there is more than one writing-getting feedback-revising cycle, and selective marking as a way to improve students’ writing abilities and their idea of academic writing. It also suggests that students be trained more on how to utilize the teacher’s written commentary.
Open Access
Making the implicit explicit: Unpacking the revision process
(2015-06) Aktuğ, Duygu
Providing feedback is an intrinsic component of writing instruction, and arguably one of the most important components when teaching a second language. Learners of English generally receive feedback on their written texts through teachers’ written comments or correction code symbols. Among these two ways of feedback provision, writing instructors often prefer giving feedback through correction symbols as it enables the students to process acquired knowledge and correct their own errors accordingly. Yet, the writing instructors have little or no idea about cognitive processes the learners experience while utilizing the correction code symbols. Therefore, this study was designed to investigate how students having different proficiency levels interpret and respond to the correction code symbols on their written output while revising their work. The study also sought to identify how useful the students find the use of correction code symbols while revising their texts. The research was conducted at a public university in Turkey with thirty two participants, who were chosen among intermediate and elementary level students on a voluntary basis. The data for this research were collected via the think-aloud protocols (TAPs) of the students while they were re-drafting their output according to the correction symbols, and retrospective interviews conducted following the TAPs. Qualitative data analysis from the TAPs and interviews indicated that the students employed certain strategies while interpreting the symbols for different error categories. The study also showed that, with the exception of syntactic errors, the intermediate level participants were able to correct their errors slightly more frequently than the elementary level students. Finally, despite some surface-level difficulties, the data retrieved from the interviews indicated that all the students regardless of their levels of proficiency found using correction code symbols helpful.