Feedback and Process Writing: “Dialog Boxes” as a Tool to Develop Written Conferencing Between Instructor and EFL Student Writers at an Advanced Level
Graciela E. Yugdar Tófalo, Argentina
Graciela Yugdar Tófalo holds a Master of Arts in Education from East Carolina University. She is a former Visiting International Faculty Program teacher, currently working at the Teachers’ Training College at Universidad Autónoma de Entre Ríos, Argentina, where she lectures on English Language I and IV. She also teaches Technical English and English for communication at Universidad Tecnológica Nacional. She has been working on the development of academic writing skills since 2004, tutoring the production of students’ research papers and academic pieces.
E-mail: gyugdar@hotmail.com
Menu
Introduction
Key issues surrounding the practice of giving feedback
Dialog boxes as a channel of communication for providing written feedback
Conclusion
References
The teaching of writing skills to students of English as a foreign language in the university teacher training setting can be described as one of the most challenging tasks to be faced by instructors. Although reasons to support the aforementioned statement abound, there are two issues that can be regarded as central to this writing context. In the first place, the development of writing skills becomes an aspect of utmost importance for students’ successful performance in the different subject areas during the four-year course of studies. That is, students need mastery of the tools that enable them to complete tasks that range form answers to exam questions to literature review research papers in specific fields of study such as Phonetics, Literature or Didactics. As well as this, upon completion of their studies, graduates become part of the EFL discourse community characterized by the spread of information and exchange of ideas via the written word. Publication of articles in magazines and journals, presentation of papers at conferences or participation in web forums are some of the activities at the core of any teacher’s professional development in today’s world-wide knowledge society.
Given the perceived centrality of the writing curriculum in teacher education, instructors are always on the lookout for different ways of facilitating the process especially in terms of what they can contribute with directly in the form of written feedback. In a process-oriented composition class, the instructor’s feedback on students’ writing, with the subsequent response to it, seems to be the fuel that makes the composition of written pieces an active process.
The aim of the present paper is to describe a system of feedback that has resulted beneficial for both students as well as instructors, by which process writing is emphasized making use of e-mails and the comment tool on the Microsoft Word application. The word system is used since the practice described here does not only involve the comments made by the teacher but also the way the drafts are handed in to the instructor and the medium used to do so. This system of feedback is used with students attending the last English Language class in the four-year course of studies at Universidad Autónoma de Entre Ríos to become EFL teachers. Although based on experiential data – as opposed to research-based – the observations provided represent the work carried out over a period of five years in which the tool used has remained the same but the efficacy of the instructors’ comments and students’ performance has improved.
Although the concept of feedback has been widely researched in the literature, it is necessary here to highlight some of the concepts in this area that make the use of the system of feedback described below relevant. Far from being mere corrections intended to criticize students’ pieces, feedback is regarded as a form of communication that leads to students’ improvement in their writing skills. MacDonald (1991) states that “[t]eachers’ feedback (fb) on students’ compositions is an important channel of teacher- student interaction which, if prevalence of practice is an indicator, is widely assumed to be a useful instructional procedure” (p. 3). Thus, feedback is a form of dialog initiated by students’ composition followed by the teacher’s comments or questions which in turn are answered in the form of revisions made by students- or direct answers to the instructors’ questions - to lead again to a new set of comments or questions formulated by the instructor. This communicative pattern continues until the piece is perceived by participants to appropriately express an intended meaning to an intended audience.
The rationale behind the practice of giving feedback to students seems to be more related with the role of the teacher in the classroom than with actual SLA findings. The presence of the teacher in the classroom is concerned with the planning, development and assessment of all the teaching-learning phenomena that take place during the process. The assessment of student work by means of written feedback is just one aspect of this bigger scenario in which the teacher feels compelled to fulfill their role in the hope that their comments will aid in the improvement of students’ work. By the same token, students expect the teacher’s comment and appraisal of their work as detailed as possible if a subsequent draft is required, as is usually the case in a process-oriented composition class. This idea is corroborated by Brice (1995) who examined the results of different surveys on students’ opinions about teachers’ comments to conclude that “ESL and EFL students want and expect their teachers to correct all their errors…[and that] students believe they profit from teacher feedback” (p. 2).
Early research into the influence of feedback on students’ compositions, however, yielded conflicting findings as to the importance and usefulness of this practice. One of the most discouraging conclusions drawn was that teacher feedback did not seem to lead to substantial student revision. Cohen (1987) cites a 1977 study conducted by Marzano and Arthur in which “students did not attempt to implement the suggestions and correct errors” (p. 57). He also reports on the results obtained by Semke in the early eighties that pointed to the conclusion that the teacher’s feedback did not foster students’ improvement in writing skill and that this improvement resulted from writing practice alone.
Several reasons for this mismatch between teachers’ intentions and students’ performance were put forth in the literature. In the first place, teacher feedback was oftentimes imprecise, full of vague comments that were used in all compositions and not catering for individual students. As well as this, teachers were found to make interpretations of students’ work that were not the intended ones, leading to comments that were incomprehensible to the students. This lack of clarity of teachers’ comments was also triggered by the type of comment itself, i.e. students did not understand what the teacher meant or found it difficult to decipher the codes used. More often than not, teachers’ feedback was characterized by a preponderance of form over meaning, resulting in compositions replete with corrections in red ink that only worked to the detriment of the students’ morale (Cohen, 1987; MacDonald, 1991; Brice, 1995; Grabe and Kaplan, 1996).
One more reason for students’ inattention to teacher’s feedback has to do with a psychological factor connected with the last aspect described above. According to MacDonald (1991) students with a low performance in written pieces as evidenced by the number of mistakes corrected in the paper will tend to view the teacher’s comments as unimportant so as “to keep a positive view of the self” (p. 4). Not attending to feedback seems to be a psychological strategy used by some students so as not to feel threatened by the situation, losing self-esteem in the process.
Some of the aspects described above seem to correlate with the practices characteristic of a product-oriented approach to writing development in which meaning is overridden by surface occurrences. Unfortunately, despite the fact that feedback that focuses mainly on surface mistakes is usually rendered as ineffective, it is not a rarity to see compositions still corrected in this tradition characterized by single instances of writing practice that yield a mark based on the number of mistakes made, with no opportunity for students to review the work done based on teachers’ feedback. This emphasis on form goes hand in hand with an overplay of accuracy over fluency, grammatical correctness over the logical development of ideas to convey a message, the mechanics of a text over the appropriate arrangement of ideas into well-built paragraphs that make up a coherent whole. Although the former is dependent on the second one and vice versa, overemphasis on the former appears to lead to no visible immediate results as the teacher correcting compositions would desire.
This last assertion finds support in SLA research studies on variability. This term is used in the literature to refer to the different language forms used by students to realize a particular linguistic item. Variable language forms are simply the manifestation of language acquisition taking place in the learner, who is believed to follow an order as well as a sequence of acquisition (Ellis, 2000). The first concept has to do with which features of the language are acquired first or last in the process and the second one with the different stages a learner goes through to internalize a specific linguistic item. Then, if there is an order and sequence of acquisition that the learner has to go through before items can be acquired, the role of instruction, in this case in the form of feedback, has certain limitations. In fact, Ellis points out that “there is growing evidence to indicate that grammar instruction does work, providing learners are ready to assimilate the new target rule [italics added] into their mental grammars, although instruction does not appear to ‘beat’ a developmental sequence [italics added]” (p. 22). Feedback at a surface level can only be given with a view to helping students in the fostering of the processes involved in language development and not as a practice that if responded to the student is to cease making the same mistake over and over again. With this in mind, the writing instructor can make informed decisions as to what and when to correct aspects of the text façade.
The next logical step here, therefore, seems to lead to describe what constitutes good feedback. Although there are no conclusive results since different studies have focused on different aspects of the providing-responding to feedback process, Grabe and Kaplan (1996) highlight that:
“[t]he teacher should find some positive things to say about any essay, raise a number of specific questions which will allow students to carry out revisions, make suggestions for changing the organization or elaborating parts of the essay, and provide a small set of concrete suggestions for improving the structural and mechanical aspects of the text (p. 394).
They also point to the aspects that should be avoided by teachers such as the overemphasis on surface mistakes, incomprehensible correction codes, or discouraging comments that only lead to poorer writing outcomes.
Although the practice of feedback is usually associated with a written practice, teacher feedback seems to have a better effect when it is accompanied by feedback administered in teacher-student conferences. Given the condition that the instructor is assigned an office or a classroom- not available in many EFL contexts - in which they can meet the students, feedback can be provided instantly with both teacher and student asking for clarifications and explanations of intended meaning. The power of conferencing seems to lie in the exchange of meaning and the filling of communicational gaps that may arise in the process. Students become active participants in the process as opposed to passively accepting teachers’ comments (Grabe and Kaplan, 1996).
Students’ preferences with regard to feedback lend support to the idea of conferencing as a positive means to provide feedback to students. As it was stated earlier, one of the reasons students do not attend to feedback is that they find teachers’ comments hard to understand or impossible to decode when a special system is used by them, for instance. In an exploratory case study on students’ perceptions of teacher feedback conducted by Brice (1995) on three students of Asian backgrounds, students reported a clear dissatisfaction with teachers’ use of symbols to mark their papers since they wanted a clear explanation of their mistakes. These findings are also supported by Ferris (1997) who found in her study of teachers’ comments and students’ response to them that “longer comments and those which were text specific [i.e. student specific] were associated with major changes [made by students to their compositions] more than shorter, general comments” (p. 330). Thus, students are likely to respond to feedback that is detailed and clearly explains what is to be changed, as is usually the case in a teacher-student conference.
For those instructors in language teaching contexts that do not allow for office hours or after-class meetings, the Internet and the comment tool on the Microsoft Office Word application might be the way forward. In keeping with a process-approach to teaching writing in the university context, in which students are given the opportunity to produce multiple drafts of a same piece and to benefit from a dialog between teacher and instructor, the comment tool becomes the room where teacher and instructors exchange comments, ask questions, clear doubts and fill in the gaps necessary to improve compositions.
Students attending the last of four English Language course levels to become teachers of English as a Foreign Language at Autonomous University of Entre Ríos are instructed to write their compositions using the Microsoft Word application and send them via mail most usually with a due date on the first draft. Students send in their composition and the instructor makes the necessary corrections by using the comment tool on the application. A problematic chunk in the text is highlighted and by clicking on the application tool, a box- dubbed a dialog box by participants- appears to the right or left of the text in which the teacher writes a comment that expects to aid the student writer. Thus, the comment might look like this:
There is, obviously, a considerable difference between how we learn our mother tongue and how we learn a foreign language. In the first case, we experience and acquire it as a social process that allows our insertion into the community but the situation of FL is different as we usually learn it through activities which make us focus on form rather than context. Fantini (2009) considers that when teaching a foreign language focusing upon content the result is that as the learner has been exposed to content only, they may know almost all the norms of the language but it is highly likely that they cannot use the language in a communicative way.
The answer to the teacher’s comment is evidenced by the student’s changes in the piece or by a direct comment in the revised copy using a different color or typeface. In the following example, the instructor had written in an earlier draft: If you have not used inverted commas, it is because you have rephrased the idea, right? Then, the student wrote:
In the work of Hoover (1976) there is also a reference to self-directed learners viewed as the kind of learner whose characteristics formal education should help to develop in all students, on the grounds that they take responsibility for their own learning and consequently learn independently of permanent teachers’ intervention. It is also highlighted that an appropriate context for developing this “begins in the elementary school and is accelerated during high school years. Maturity and experience are its two basic ingredients” (pp. 114-115).
The dialog is not teacher-initiated only as is the case in the following example of a student asking for advice on her research paper:
Conscientious understanding of the impact that school has on students for the rest of their lives proves necessary to adequately address students’ involvement in their learning process. Learner autonomy development constitutes a clue as to how to approach this objective and to make a favourable transition to a stage of heavier responsibilities. What is more, it allows learners to find their experience at school purposeful, useful and enjoyable. Otherwise, could primary and secondary school be regarded as essential and crucial stages for a person to undergo if they do not contribute to her/his personal growth, self-management and good relationship with others in adulthood?
In this way, the teacher and the student communicate as if in a face-to-face encounter commenting on problematic sections of the text. The corrections made by the teacher by means of dialog boxes are mainly meaning-connected gaps that may arise from problems with the transition from one idea to the next, poor topic sentence elaboration, lack of logical connection between thesis statement and body paragraphs, or register mismatches. As needed, the teacher offers detailed help most usually, although not exclusively, by means of questions that involve the rephrasing of students’ words with regard to the content or organization of ideas that might lead to revisions. Since there is evidence that questioning is not the best form of feedback that results in better student revisions (Ferris, 1997), these questions are phrased carefully so as to bring students’ attention to a weak part in their composition, avoiding empty questions that only repeat what is already in the text and do not offer any kind of guidance for reformulation in a subsequent draft.
Surface level mistakes are also brought to the students’ attention but by means of highlighting. Words or phrases that represent a grammar mistake are highlighted in a pink color and chunks that might need rephrasing, but it is left to the students to decide, are highlighted in yellow. The reasons for doing this are twofold: students have the language proficiency to correct what is highlighted by the teacher and students need to feel that surface mistakes are not what the teacher is after in the composition class. Surprisingly, by downplaying the importance of grammar mistakes, compositions begin to display fewer highlighted parts as the class progresses. Even though this is a topic for further research, one of the possible observable explanations is that when the students are focused on conveying meaning, rather than not making mistakes, they make use of all the linguistic elements available in their repertoire to express ideas in the best manner possible, reformulating ideas and self-editing their pieces at every moment of the writing process.
There are several positive aspects connected with the use of the above-mentioned system of feedback to enhance writing in process-oriented composition classes. In the first place, as it was stated earlier, by means of dialog boxes feedback is provided in the form of a dialog, which, by definition, involves the exchange of ideas. This practice is highly productive in two ways: students become aware of the fact that they own the texts they write because teacher’s comments are not regarded as definite, conclusive, and that there is always a possibility for a dialog to take place at the same time they enhance the writing thought processes entailed in the rethinking and reformulation of ideas as they are posing a question to the teacher. Even if the student does not want to interact by means of direct questions or comments, the possibility to do so is there whenever they may find it necessary. Dialog boxes, then, become the conference room for providing feedback and asking for it.
Advantages connected with the actual administration of feedback on the text are also evident with this approach to feedback. The use of dialog boxes maintains the students’ copy neat, avoids any kind of misunderstandings stemming from handwriting, highlights specific parts of the text which stand out when the box is clicked on, allows for the use of all the available text processor tools and keeps the comments organized with numbers which make it easier to provide cross-references to different comments made by the teacher. The overall result is a draft with corrections that are pleasing to the eye, and, consequently, not damaging to the students’ morale with so many intrusions into their texts.
The way the writing assignments are handed in to the instructor is a key factor in the development of the idea of dialog boxes as conferencing. Students are instructed to always turn in new drafts together with the previously corrected versions, placing the latest version first and pasting all the previous copies further down with the first draft at the bottom of file. That is, one single file will contain as many drafts as the student has produced. When all the dialog boxes included in the different versions are read together from the lower end of the file, a clear pattern of conversation can be observed, with the instructor and the student writer exchanging comments about the text as explained above.
Apart from being a central aspect in the conferencing concept, this arrangement of drafts also results beneficial for both the student writer and the instructor. The former are reminded of the importance of having the corrected drafts at hand so as to review the points made by the teacher as well as to view a second, third or fourth draft as the continuation of the same piece with its improvement, or the absence of it, right in front of them. By the same token, this system allows the teacher to see students’ progress and response to feedback, by establishing a comparison between the drafts and identifying the problems that have been overcome and the sections of the text that still need improvement. This analysis can also be carried out with all of the works produced by the students since these assignments can be easily stored on the teacher’s computer –unlike keeping a paper copy of students’ drafts in terms of room and copying expenses- in this way assessing students’ performance across genres and task types along a writing continuum as opposed to single instances of production.
One last positive component of this approach to feedback is the use of the email message as the medium to exchange drafts between the teacher and the students. The frequency of exchange is increased via e-mail since there is no need for the participants to meet face-to-face to do so. The Internet has eliminated the time and place constraints present in the old writing context where the exchange of pieces was contingent upon the participants meeting in the class. Thus, once the first draft has been turned in, the teacher and the student writer begin exchanging drafts with dialog boxes until both parts deem it necessary. Moreover, the text of the email message is further used to clear doubts or to suggest solutions to problems in the drafts, contributing to the overall concept of conferencing via written feedback.
The development of process-writing tools is central to those instructors involved in composition classes aimed at students who will use this skill upon graduation to communicate and exchange ideas with the members of the large and ever-growing discourse community of well-rounded EFL professionals. Achieving this goal with the resources available –many times very scarce in some contexts – turns this task even more challenging. Although the perceived positive results obtained from the use of this tool should be subjected to a more rigorous analysis based on research data, dialog boxes become a useful tool to enhance writing as a communicative act in which the participants truly exchange ideas and negotiate meanings. As important as the end result is- especially to the students as writers who want to express their own thoughts- the emphasis is on the process, i.e. on all the exchanges realized through the dialog boxes by which the students review, reorganize, categorize, rephrase, or even discard ideas based on feedback that might be challenged if necessary.
Brice, C. (1995). ESL Writers’ Reactions to Teacher Commentary: A Case Study. Presented at the 1995 Meeting of TESOL, Long Beach, California. Retrieved February 21, 2009 from
www.eric.ed.gov
Cohen, A. (1987). Student Processing of Feedback on Their Compositions. In A. L. Wenden & J. Rubin (Eds.) Learner Strategies in Language Learning (pp 57-59). Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall International. Retrieved February 3, 2009 from:
www.tc.umn.edu
Ferris, D. (1997). The Influence of Teacher Commentary on Student Revision. Tesol Quarterly, Vol. 31, No. 2, pp. 315-339.
Grabe, W. & Kaplan, R. B. (1996). Theory and Practice of Writing. Harlow, Essex: Longman.
MacDonald, R.B. (1991). Developmental Students’ Processing of Teacher Feedback in Composition Instruction. Review of Research in Developmental Education. Volume 8, Issue 5, pp. 1-5. Retrieved February 3, 2009 from:
www.eric.ed.gov
Please check the Methodology and Language for Secondary Teachers course at Pilgrims website.
Please check the Teaching Advanced Students course at Pilgrims website.
|
