Abstract
Teacher-student conference is one feedback technique to enhance students' writing. This study aims to investigate the effects of teacher-student conference on paragraph writing of EFL learners and explore students' opinions towards teacher-student conference as a feedback technique. The sample involved 23 Thai English major students taking a paragraph writing course. The research instruments consisted of pretest/posttest, writing tasks, writing rubric, the report on teacher-student conferencing, and a semi-structured interview. T-test, min, max, mean, standard deviation, and content analysis were used for data analysis. The results showed that students significantly improved their paragraph writing after teacher-student conferencing at .05 level. Students got the highest mean score in a process paragraph but the lowest mean score in a narrative paragraph. Topic sentence was the highest aspect that students improved their writing in, while verb tense was the least. Students' opinions were found in five areas: 1) discuss strengths and weaknesses, 2) build relationships between students and teacher, 3) develop ideas on assignments, 4) plan for revision, and 5) clarify grades. The results showed that students thought the main advantage of the teacher-student conference was developing ideas, whereas clarifying grades was the least advantageous. Further studies should work on strategies to improve each type of writing so that teachers can apply each writing strategy in response to the different learning needs of students.
Highlights
In the field of foreign language learning, EFL learners often experience difficulty writing well in the target language
The teaching of writing for EFL learners involves many issues such as writing instruction that does not focus on the writing process, students are careless when making corrections given by teachers, and feedback strategies that do not identify writing errors accurately [27, 37]
The results are presented in two parts regarding the two research objectives: 1) to investigate the effects of the teacher-student conference to enhance the writing ability of EFL undergraduate learners, and 2) to explore students’ opinions toward the teacher-student conference
Summary
In the field of foreign language learning, EFL learners often experience difficulty writing well in the target language. The teaching of writing for EFL learners involves many issues such as writing instruction that does not focus on the writing process, students are careless when making corrections given by teachers, and feedback strategies that do not identify writing errors accurately [27, 37]. These problems affect writing instruction and lead to minimal improvement in students’ writing. The objectives of this study are: 1) to investigate the effects of teacher-student conference on the writing ability of EFL undergraduate learners and 2) to explore students’ opinions toward teacher-student conference
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