A SOCIOCULTURAL PERSPECTIVE ON TEACHERS’ FEEDBACK IN EFL STUDENTS’ ASSIGNMENT WRITING

Abstract

Unlike some other academic skills, the ability to write well is something like a challenge, especially in writing argumentative text. EFL students find it difficult to arrange and develop the text. Therefore, the teacher needs to guide and give feedback on their writing progress. Regarding the sociocultural theory which emphasizes that cognitive development happens through social interactions such as language learning. Thus, providing feedback for their writing would be beneficial, might improve their writing performance, and might motivate them to write. This research observes the teachers' feedback on students' argumentative writing based on sociocultural theory. Then, the data were collected from fivelecturers of paragraph writing courses who provided written feedback on students' argumentative text. The data were taken from the questionnaire and interview. Further, this study uses qualitative research design to analyze the data by transcribing, coding, categorizing, and interpreting the result. The result reveals that the lecturers prefer to use direct feedback. Further, the lecturers are more concerned about structure and content rather than students' grammatical errors. It is due to that the lecturers focus on how students write an argumentative text, and how students learn how to organize the ideas well in argumentative writing.