Teachers' corrective feedback strategies in assessing essay writing

Abstract

Feedback has been an important topic of discussion in language learning. Although research on written corrective feedback is available, there is little research on the specific strategies employed by teachers in order to provide feedback on their students' essay writing. This paper reports part of a larger research. One of the objectives of this study was to explore corrective feedback strategies employed by the English as a second language (ESL) teachers and English language expert raters when assessing their students' written essays. This study used qualitative case study which involved 12 participants. Data were collected through interviewing nine English language teachers and three English language expert raters to obtain their pedagogic practices in providing written corrective feedback. The strategies identified are based on Ellis's typology of strategies for providing written corrective feedback. The findings showed that the preferred written corrective feedback strategy used by the teachers and raters was Metalinguistic Corrective Feedback with Direct Corrective Feedback and Focused Corrective Feedback used by only a few of them. This study has pedagogical implications in that it explains the ESL teachers/expert raters' pedagogical attitude and practices towards error correction and their preferred written corrective feedback strategies in dealing with error correction.