Issues and dilemmas: what conditions are necessary for effective teacher written feedback for ESL learners?

Providing feedback to students is often seen as one of the teacher’s most important tasks. It is a chance for the teachers to provide information to students to help them understand their writing progress, weaknesses and strengths that is otherwise rarely possible under big classroom conditions. This article will tackle the difficult dilemma: is teacher written feedback effective? What does the research conclude are conditions necessary for effective teacher written feedback? First, I will give an overview of the important research done on written feedback, with a focus on: the dilemmas teachers face, ways to respond to ESL texts and the theoretical issues involved in giving feedback. Next, I will examine the present research on “effective written feedback. ” Finally, I will give some guidance as to what are generally conceived as the most effective practices of written feedback and error correction. I argue that indeed written feedback does matter, and there are some effective strategies to giving feedback. Key terms: feedback, teacher written comments, ESL writers, ESL texts Introduction Teachers spend countless hours evaluating, grading, and writing feedback on students’ papers. These judgments provide information to the students to help them understand their writing progress, weaknesses and strengths. Teachers usually spend a fair amount of time and effort thinking about the best way to respond to students because of the value placed on giving feedback. Moreover, providing feedback to students is often seen as one of the teacher’s most important tasks because it is a chance to offer individual attention that would otherwise rarely be possible under big classroom conditions. Is the feedback always effective? Do students learn to minimize their error correction and maximize clarity through teacher’s comments? Do students indeed become better writers? This paper will tackle these difficult questions with a search for answers to these two simple questions: does feedback matter and what does the research show are effective approaches to giving teacher generated written feedback? First, I will give an overview of the research done on written feedback, with a focus on: the dilemmas teachers face, ways to respond to ESL texts and the theoretical issues involved when giving feedback. I will also examine the present research on “effective written feedback. ” As well as giving some guidance as to what are generally conceived as the most effective practices of written feedback and error-correction. I argue that indeed written feedback does matter, and there are some effective strategies to giving feedback. What is “teacher written feedback”? There are many types of feedback students receive, but for the purpose of this paper I will limit my research to an evaluation of teacher created written feedback on ESL student papers. I define teacher generated written Polyglossia Vol. 16, February 2009 34 feedback as any comments, questions or error correction written on students’ assignments. These written comments can range from questions about the author’s intended meaning, praise for an interesting idea, grammar mistakes, corrections, and finally explicit corrections. Overview of ESL the Different Approaches to Research on Feedback Written feedback in education has always been looked at as important for both encouraging and synthesizing learning. Interest in feedback emerged with the development of “learner center approaches” such as process writing in North American first language composition classes during the 1970s. This approach gave greater attention to teacher-student encounters around texts and “encouraged teachers to support writers through multiple drafts by providing feedback and suggesting revisions during the process of writing itself, rather that at the end of it” (Hyland & Hyland, 2006, p. 1). In other words, formative feedback was seen as more effective than summative feedback. Before the 1990s, most research on written feedback and response was done only on error correction. However, in the 1990s, with the advent of the genre-based approach, feedback became important to provide students the “rhetorical choices central to academic or professional literacy skills and as a way of assisting students in negotiating access to new knowledge and practices” (Hyland & Hyland, 2006, p. 2). Today many researchers analyze teacher written response from a “socio-cultural perspective” focusing on: teacher control, and political and social dominance (Hyland & Hyland, 2006). Overview of the different teacher styles of Feedback Responding to texts can be seen as a communicative act, the teacher is ultimately trying to give the student feedback on their strengths and weaknesses to help improve their writing. Every Teacher has a different style of giving feedback; some teachers do not leave a paragraph untouched and fill the paper with red comments pointing out error correction. Other teachers write very few comments on papers, some even write next to nothing. What can account for these very different styles of feedback? What underlying belief system or theories inform these teachers? In “the Sociopolitical Implications of Response to Second Language and Second Dialect Writing,” Carol Severino draws on Min-Zhan Lu’s framework in describing three approaches that readers can take when responding to ESL texts: assimilationist, accommodationist, and separatist. She argues that an inexperienced reader looks at the writer’s text through an assimilationist approach and that the reader’s goal is to help the author error free and idiomatic English as soon as possible. (Serevino, 1993, p. 187). Therefore they read difference as “deficiency. ” The accommodationist approach also tries to teach native English norms and still regards some differences as deficiencies. However, their goal is different than that of the assimilationist. Ultimately, they want the ESL writer to learn “new discourse patterns without completely losing the old, so that the writer can maintain both their L1 (first language) and L2 (second language) linguistic and cultural identities” (Matsuda & Cox, 2004, p. 42). The accomdationist approach acknowledges that genre and writing processes knowledge are necessary for ESL writers however it is not necessary for an ESL learner to adopt idiomatic English. Finally, the separatist approach advocates not giving feedback with the purpose of changing the writing to sound more like a Native English Speaker. As cited in Matsuda and Cox (2004), the separaratist goal is to, “support the writer in maintaining separate linguistic and cultural identities, and to advocate for native English speaker readers to read ESL texts ‘generously’ with more appreciation for multicultural writing (p. 42). Moreover, the separatist reads to overlook and therefore preserve difference. In conclusion, these 3 different