Abstract
Formative assessment and adaptive instruction have been focus areas in Norwegian educational policy for more than a decade. Writing instruction in the language subjects is no exception; assessment of writing should help the learners improve their writing skills and, thus, feedback must be adapted to the individual learner’s needs. The present study aims to shed light on the relations between teacher feedback practices and learner uptake in French-as-a-foreign-language upper secondary classes in Norway. Using material from a longitudinal corpus of learner texts, including teacher feedback (the TRAWL corpus), the study investigates the written feedback practices of three L3 French teachers, and explores whether any signs of uptake can be identified in 27 learners’ new pieces of writings. The findings show that although the teachers followed best practice principles for formative assessment and written corrective feedback, less than half of the students showed any signs of uptake in subsequent pieces of writing. With one exception, these were students with an intermediate-high to very high proficiency level in French. The study emphasises the importance of strategies that could encourage learners to use the feedback they receive, thus moving the centre of attention from teacher practices to learner activities.
Highlights
Ever since the Norwegian Directorate for Education and Training launched the national Assessment for Learning programme in 2010, formative assessment and differentiated instruction have been emphasised in Norwegian educational policy (Norwegian Directorate for Education and Training 2018)
The proficiency level analysis described above revealed that all four International Baccalauréate (IB) students had a very high proficiency level in French
In general studies class (GS-A), one student was classified with a high proficiency level, four with the level intermediate-high, five intermediate-low, and three with a low proficiency level in French
Summary
Ever since the Norwegian Directorate for Education and Training launched the national Assessment for Learning programme in 2010, formative assessment and differentiated instruction have been emphasised in Norwegian educational policy (Norwegian Directorate for Education and Training 2018). The Assessment for Learning programme aimed at developing feedback practices and cultures that were conducive to learning, in all subjects and for all skills. What constitutes effective formative feedback in writing instruction is a hotly debated topic. Much-cited and well known is the debate between Truscott and Ferris regarding written error correction, which started with Truscott’s claim that such feedback does not help learners improve their language (Truscott 1996). Ferris (1999) argued the opposite, and since several metastudies have tried to establish the effects of error correction on learner written language, often with inconclusive results (see Truscott 2016). Research from the English-as-a-second-language (L2) field in Norway can be interpreted as lending some support to Truscott’s claims, as follows: studies show that teachers provide error correction on learner writing, this feedback is not always perceived by learners as formative in nature and many learners admit that they do not make use of the feedback they receive (Burner 2016; Saliu-Abdulahi and Hellekjær 2020)
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