Theorizing written feedback as a mediation tool within the Sydney School’s genre pedagogy: a focus on ZPD and scaffolding

Abstract

Despite the abundance of research on feedback in second language development, there is little agreement on what type of feedback is the most effective. Four perspectives emerge from the literature that investigates feedback, specifically: Second Language Acquisition (SLA), Second Language Writing (L2W), Sociocultural Theory (SCT) and the Sydney School’s genre pedagogy. The SLA and L2W approaches investigate the effectiveness of corrective feedback, the SCT and the Sydney School perspectives explore feedback as a supportive mediation tool. However, both corrective and supportive types of feedback gain importance in L2 literacy development. Therefore, this paper aims to categorise written feedback as a corrective and supportive tool drawing on the Sydney School’s genre pedagogy. An analysis of the feedback instances indicates that written feedback is more effective when it is cast in relation to students’ ZPD. The categorization presented in this paper offers a rich framework for L2 writing instructors, as it situates written feedback as a mediation tool based on the related notions of ZPD and scaffolding.