Paper Title
Impact of Teacher Feedback on Adult Student Writing
Abstract
Teacher’s feedback to student writing played an extremely important role in second language writing (L2) [3]. When providing feedback, most teachers adopted an indirect error correction approach i.e. indication of errors by means of an underline, mark or code. This classroom-based research aims to explore whether direct written corrective feedback is an effective approach to improve the writing ability of a class of L2 adult learners of Business English. The findings also helped the teacher to review the function of correcting errors in terms of scaffolding learning in English language. Data collection was limited to three sources: sample of student writing scripts, students’ responses to a questionnaire, and transcripts of informal interview with secondary school teachers. The findings revealed that when the teacher’s and students’ perspective on feedback approach corresponded with each other, it could, to some extent, give a positive value for teacher’s feedback. The adult students in this study welcomed direct written corrective feedback because such approach could help them identify their writing issues promptly and effectively. Furthermore, the positive findings in this study confirmed that teacher’s feedback did play an important role in improving the writing accuracy in this class of adult learners.
Index Terms - Error correction, second language learning, written corrective feedback