The Role of an Instructor’s Asynchronous Feedback in Promoting Students’ Interaction and Text Revisions

Abstract

This study focused on teacher asynchronous feedback and how it engaged 15 English as Foreign language (EFL) learners in revising their writing. The data was collected from (1) the teacher’s feedback, (2) students’ responses and, (3) students’ drafts of writing. The data analysis showed that the teacher provided a number of 832 items of feedback which were categorized into “question” as the most dominating category, followed by “statement”, “suggestion”, “directive” and “correction”. Three hundred and eighty (380;46%) of the feedback items were direct, while 452 (54%) were indirect. The feedback focused on content, organization, vocabulary, grammar, mechanics and more general/not specific comments. Teacher’s feedback (1) engaged the learners in text revisions (overall=1102 comments), (2) stimulated their responses (overall=1032 comments) and (3) extended their online asynchronous interactions. Of the total amount of text revisions (1102), 362 (33%) were made based on the teacher’s direct feedback, and 427 (38%) of them were based on the teacher’s indirect feedback, while 313 (29%) were based on peers’ and self-corrections. The learners revised their writing in terms of content, organization, vocabulary, grammar and mechanics. The findings have implications for teacher interactive feedback practices in writing and the role of asynchronous tools in facilitating such practices.