“Students’ Perceptions of Written Instructor Feedback on Student Writing”
Download PDF About the AuthorEric Wisz is currently a graduate student in the University of Central Florida’s Rhetoric and Composition M.A. program. His research interests include writing center studies and instructor feedback on student writing. Contents |
Instructor Feedback in LiteratureInstructor as a Reader and Audience AwarenessA common goal of instructor feedback is to give student writers the perspective of a reader on their writing. As Elbow (1973) eloquently put it, he tries “to transmit my experience of [their] words” (p. 121). The hope is that in doing so student writers will understand their readers’ points of view and develop a sense of audience awareness, an important rhetorical skill one needs to produce effective writing. This is a skill that extends far beyond academic writing, one that writers can use in future communicative interaction. Audience awareness is important to understanding where dissonance exists between a writer’s intended meaning and the meaning perceived by a reader. Brannon and Knoblauch (1982) argued that the urge to revise comes from the sense of not having fully communicated an intended meaning (p. 163). They suggested that by pointing out the perceived meaning (instead of formal or technical flaws), instructors can highlight where in the text the perceived meaning falls short of the intended meaning and, in doing so, create this urge to revise. For Brannon and Knoblauch, the purpose of instructor feedback is to “make the writer think about what has been said, not to tell the writer what to do” (p. 163). They believed firmly in a nondirective approach that “return[s] control of choice-making as soon as possible to the writer, while also creating a motive for making changes” (p. 163). Instructors may suggest “ways to eliminate the discrepancies,” but they must leave “decisions about alternative choices to the writer” (p. 162). The revision process is an opportunity for writers to continue asserting their control over the text but this time with a reader’s point of view in mind. Promoting a sense of audience awareness with student writers can assist in providing assistance with technical flaws. Shaughnessy (1977) emphasized that even in learning grammar, it is important that student writers understand readers’ perspectives (p. 39–40). Like Brannon and Knoblauch (1982), Shaughnessy discussed revision as the process of rereading one’s text and determining where the intended meaning that exists in writers’ heads is not fully communicated on the page. Shaughnessy further explained that even when writers are able to make this determination, they still need to determine specifically where revision needs to be made to eliminate the identified dissonance (p. 78–79). Thus, Shaughnessy argued, it is important for instructors to be, and for students to understand instructors as, readers earnestly trying to understand writers’ meanings rather than people making corrections (p. 84). Feedback Familiarizing Students with Discourse CommunitiesAcademic disciplines are groups of people with the same goals, and the values that underlie these goals form discourse communities of and within academic disciplines (Journet, 1999). Feedback on student writing can be used to communicate values and norms of these discourse communities to students. In his case for paralogic hermeneutics in rhetorical theory, Kent (1989) argued that the linguistic conventions shared within a discourse community actually reflect much deeper, somewhat shared yet perpetually shifting systems of interpretation. In his discussion of paralogic hermeneutic theories, Dobrin (1999) suggested that discourse community expectations—the results of these semi-shared systems of interpretations—should be clear to students so that they are empowered to be effective communicators in these discourse communities. According to paralogic hermeneutic theories, communication requires a collaborative dialogue, specifically a triangulation between two communicators and common objects in the world. Breuch (2002) supported this dialogic approach to instruction as an effective way to practice post-process pedagogy. In terms of feedback as dialogue, systems of interpretation of discourse communities are actualized in individual moments of communication that involve an instructor, a student, and the student’s text. In other words, feedback is a place where the structures of these systems of interpretation are constructed via instructor-student dialogue, and, as such, feedback is a tool that instructors use, wittingly or not, to communicate the values of these systems and communities to students. Feedback should be framed in such a way that makes the discourse communities, their ways of knowing, their values, and the reasons for these values clear to student so that students can more proficiently navigate and participate in them in the future. Student PerspectivesPrevious studies on students’ perspectives on instructor feedback on student writing have found a diverse array of student opinions on and preferences for feedback. In their study of students’ perspectives of feedback, Poulos and Mahony (2008) found that “students do not hold a homogenous view of what effective feedback is and how it could be used” (p. 145). Straub (1997) found that students prefer a variety of forms of written feedback, including advice, open-ended questions, and explanation. Despite the diversity of student preferences in terms of feedback, general trends of how students perceive feedback and its utility emerge from previous research. Previous work indicated that students prefer feedback that is clear (Bevan, Badge, Cann, Willmott, & Scott, 2008; Lizzio & Wilson, 2008). In their literature review of students’ and instructors’ perspectives of feedback, Agius and Wilkinson (2013) noted a number of studies (Duers & Brown, 2009; Duncan, 2007; Higgins, Hartley, & Skelton, 2002) that found that academic terminology prevented students from understanding instructor feedback. Though Nicol (2010) did not collect data from students, Nicol advised instructors to make sure they are expressing feedback with terminology that students can understand. Along these lines, studies have also found that students tend to prefer feedback that is specific. In their surveys of students, Lynch and Klemans (1978) and Straub (2000) found that students prefer elaboration or explanation in feedback. Robinson, Pope, and Holyoak (2013) found a primary concern of students in terms of feedback is a “lack of information about how to improve work” (p. 267), and Agius and Wilkinson (2013) found specificity to be a major trend in research on what students expect in feedback (Bone, 2006; Duers & Brown, 2009; Duncan, 2007; Higgins et al., 2002; Poulos & Mahony, 2008; Straub, 1997; Weaver, 2006). Research has indicated that students desire feedback that will help them improve their future writing practices as well (Bevan et al., 2008; Carless, 2006). Feedback can certainly contain advice that is both context specific and transferable, as suggested by Ädel (2016) and Nicol (2010). Straub’s (2000) results lend insight to what his student participants view as the nature of writing—the transcription of ideas. Straub found that students respond well to positive comments, preferring comments that acknowledge and develop (not deconstruct) the ideas on the page. However, students in this study believed there to be a strong distinction between form and content and did not necessarily feel that the main purpose of instructor feedback is to focus on the ideas (content) but the writing itself (form). Straub (1997) found that students tended to dislike negative comments on content. Lynch and Klemans (1978) also found that students resent comments on the content of their writing. This could be due to the fact that students “view writing as essentially a matter of transcribing thought, not a way of thinking and shaping thought” (Straub, 2000, p. 264). If students at times perhaps do not recognize writing as the process of developing ideas just as much as it is the process of transcribing them, then they will not likely see the process of revision as the development of ideas but may view it as simply the refinement of language used to describe these ideas. This has an impact on what students view as the nature of feedback as well—a tool for instructors to discuss with students the language used to describe ideas, not to discuss the ideas themselves. Studies on Multilingual Writers’ Perceptions and Uses of FeedbackMuch of the scholarship on students’ perceptions and uses of instructor feedback on student writing has focused on multilingual students. While this study includes multilingual participants, the majority of the participants are native-English speakers. However, there are certainly parallels between findings that focus on native-English speakers and multilingual students. Conrad and Goldstein (1999) and Hyland (1998, 2003) noted that multilingual students’ use of instructor feedback varies greatly from student to student. Ferris (1997) found that specific comments tended to prompt more positive revision among multilingual students than did general comments, and Goldstein (2004) also suggested that instructors give text-specific feedback. In terms of specificity, Goldstein also argued for including specific suggestions for revision strategies in feedback. Feedback on content. Literature on feedback for multilingual writers tends to focus on feedback in terms of content and feedback in terms of error or form. Hedgcock and Lefkowitz (1994) found that multilingual students prefer feedback related to content in earlier drafts of an assignment and feedback related to errors in later drafts of the assignment, which was the opposite of the concerns expressed by native-English speakers in the study. Abdollahifam (2014) found that feedback related to the ideas of the writing, the instructor’s ideas on the topic, and request for further explanation had a positive effect on student motivation and writing. While Ferris (1997) also found that requests for more information led to significant revision, these revisions did not always have a positive impact on the students’ papers. Feedback on errors. Hyland (2003) and McMartin-Miller (2014) found that multilingual writers see the value in feedback related to errors. Students in Hyland’s study believed that repeated feedback on errors would lead to long-term improvement in error recognition and correction (p. 228). McMartin-Miller found that multilingual students prefer comprehensive error feedback but were satisfied with the common practice of selective marking of repeated errors. Ferris (1997, 2006), Ferris and Roberts (2001), and McMartin-Miller (2014) found that instructor feedback on errors led to student self-editing and revisions. McMartin-Miller found no difference between more and less-explicit error feedback in terms of self-editing, whereas Ferris (2006) found that less-explicit, or indirect, error feedback led to greater writing improvement over time. The aim of this study is to contribute to the research on students’ perceptions of feedback a handful of in-depth student perspectives on instructor feedback on student writing. In order to gather in-depth responses, participants were asked to read and engage with mock student writing and instructor feedback in one-on-one interviews. |