Example C - WRITTEN FEEDBACK

Setting: Academic Writing in English as a Foreign Language class, Hadara Perpignan, Bar-Ilan University, Israel (2003)

The Puzzle

• What kind of feedback, if any, did students consider most useful for learning?
• To what extent was the feedback, as it was intended by the teacher, comprehensible to the receiver?
• After receiving feedback, what strategies did students use in order to plan and produce future writing?
• What were the students' attitudes toward the feedback, the feedback giver and the process of holding a written dialogue through feedback about their writing?

EP principle 2: What began as a quest for a theory that could inspire guidelines for teacher effectiveness became a quest for an understanding of the conditions under which effectiveness could best be achieved. In EP terms, these conditions represent life in the classroom and the quest illustrates the aim of teacher research: to strive toward improving the quality of the life that will enable more effective use of the feedback dialogue as a crucial element in the writing process.

The Method

Use of data 'already in' (as a result of the original aims of the study)

• a data-generated questionnaire probing the learners' preferences for feedback content, type and intent, in retrospect.
• a questionnaire-based activity which attempted to capture the nature of the residue of the feedback several months after it was experienced
• a 40-50 minute semi-structured interview conducted at the end of the course,

Two further techniques based on EP principle 6:

• 'The Matching Game', devised to observe the cognitive processes used by the teacher and the learners respectively in formulating and interpreting the feedback through use of converse questions. Eg T answers the question 'What is the main weakness of this piece of writing?' and L answers the question 'What was your teacher's strongest criticism of your writing?' so responses can be matched.
• 'the "Z"Activity', administered during the first half of the course, devised to help students make the requests for feedback that would be most useful to them, in the most useful way to the teacher, using the same mutually comprehensible language.

Findings, Reflection and Interpretation

• A wide range of preferences was manifested for the feedback contents (e.g., 'ideas'), types (e.g., positive comments), and intentions (e.g., giving more or less independence to the learner); some kinds of feedback enjoyed high consensus of preference (e.g., organization), some low (e.g., question form), but rarely was there total agreement.
• Misunderstandings were many; these stemmed from diverse sources, varying with the individual ability and beliefs of the learners, but through the dialogue initiated by the feedback, it was possible to create better conditions for understanding by the receiver.
• In the face of puzzlement or misunderstanding, students mostly tried to cope somehow; they attempted revisions even when they did not understand, leading to the conclusion that the dialogic situation is per se an incentive toward change, perhaps independent from the comprehensibility of the content of the dialogue.
• Students used various strategies, which cannot be disconnected from the input they received in the classroom as well as from factors outside the classroom.
• There was wide variability among students in their use of feedback for revision. There was no sign that the use of feedback depended on how it was written or what was written, but rather it seemed highly dependent on their beliefs about learning and about the role of the teacher in this learning.
• How learners judge the salience of feedback varied greatly among subjects. Manners of dealing with the teacher as authority through the feedback tended to vary greatly among students, and within individuals, over time.
• The variability seemed to be a factor of personality and learning style, but also of their expectations, which changed with a growing understanding of the role of feedback in their own learning process, of the teacher's pedagogical principles and personal strengths and weaknesses, and of their (the learners' and the teacher's) joint goals.

Implications

• it is not the mutual understanding that has the greatest potential to promote learning, but rather the knowledge by both parties that efforts are being made toward such understanding. It is therefore not the explicitly conveyed messages and their encoding that should be focused by teachers and researchers, in order to generate better conditions for feedback effectiveness, but the intentions which inspire them and the means which promote them.
• written feedback is a powerful tool in learning to write, not so much through the messages it conveys as through the very act of conveying these messages. This leads to a focus on the part of the writer of feedback not on finding ways to transmit these messages but rather on finding ways to make them more meaningful: to transmit saliency, tone, intention, empathy and, above all, to keep feedback up as a subject for discussion in itself, couched in an open-ended dialogue.

Hadara Perpignan (Bar-Ilan University) Exploring the written feedback dialogue: a research, learning and teaching practice Language Teaching Research 7,2 (2003); pp. 259-278