Grading, no longer an obstacle to learners' attendance to teacher feedback

Abstract

Learners are often reported not to be motivated enough to attend to teacher feedback. Teachers also tend to grade learners’ writing samples when providing them with corrective feedback though they know it may divert their attention away from teacher feedback. However, not grading learner writings does not seem to be an option due to both learners’ demands for it and institutional regulations that require teachers to have summative evaluation. In order to overcome such contradictions, a new technique called Draft-Specific Scoring (DSS) was devised in order to use grading as a motivating, rather than demotivating, device in order to encourage learners to attend to teacher feedback and apply it to their first drafts to improve the quality of their writing accordingly. DSS is a grading system in which learners can improve their received grade by applying teacher feedback to their writing samples in order to improve its quality. The score they receive will improve as a result of the improvement in the quality of the revisions they make. They have two opportunities to go through this procedure. Their final score will be the mean score of all the grades they receive in their last drafts submitted. This experimental study was an attempt to check the effect of the use of this technique in error feedback provision on three measures of fluency, grammatical complexity, and accuracy. The results showed that DSS could help learners improve in all three measures while the control group receiving only error feedback without DSS could only improve in fluency.