This paper presents the results of a small scale action research project in which a group of seven Year 2 undergraduate initial teacher education (ITE) students experienced three interventions which were concerned with feedback on essay... more
This paper presents the results of a small scale action research project in which a group of seven Year 2 undergraduate initial teacher education (ITE) students experienced three interventions which were concerned with feedback on essay assignments—provision of traditional written tutor feedback; completion of a tutor feedback analysis worksheet; and an experience of peer marking, with an opportunity for re-submission of work. After each intervention students were asked to reflect on the effectiveness of the intervention. The paper presents a brief overview of recent research on the topic of assignment feedback, and the results of this project are considered in the context of this.
Realising the importance of writing in ESL classrooms, teachers are keen in devising various strategies that can help students to improve their writing skill. However, due to constraints, such as, time constraint and large number of... more
Realising the importance of writing in ESL classrooms, teachers are keen in devising various strategies that can help students to improve their writing skill. However, due to constraints, such as, time constraint and large number of students to attend to, teachers often find it difficult to provide feedback on students’ written work. One of the ways that teachers can adopt in facilitating student revisions is through teacher written feedback. Past studies have shown that both teachers and students value teacher written feedback in the language classroom. This study investigates the effects of teacher written feedback on undergraduates’ writing in an English L2 classroom at Universiti Malaysia Perlis, a local university in Malaysia. This study explores the use of three types of feedback- suggestion, criticism, and praise and which type of feedback from these three encourages student revisions. Mixed-method research design is used to obtain the data for this study. The success of revisions is discussed in terms of length and overall improvement in the revised compositions. This study reveals that all types of teacher written feedback encourage student revisions. In addition, findings also show that criticism type of feedback results in more successful revisions as it is more specific. The questionnaire also proves that students have positive attitude towards teacher written feedback.
