EFL students' cognitive journey through the teacher's written feedback

Abstract

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.