In a K-12 ESL Space: Teacher's Indirect Corrective Feedback (ICF) and its Effects to Students' Writing Skills

Abstract

During the development of writing as a macro skill, teachers provide indirect corrective feedback (ICF) to improve the written outputs of their students. To find out the effects of this scaffolding initiative, this study underscores the application of ICF to students' writing errors and investigates whether the interpretation of students to the ICF corresponds to the actual justification of their teacher. Following a descriptive-qualitative design, the corpora were collected by assigning a writing task to Grade 12 public senior high school ABM students and by conducting a follow-up semi-structured interview to both the English teacher and the student-participants. Samples from the data were organized, coded, and interpreted through thematic analysis. Findings indicate that the recorded writing errors were subject- verb disagreement and incorrect/ lack of pronoun as well as incorrect/ lack of punctuations and incorrect/ unnecessary capitalization found in the students' language use and mechanics component, respectively. A number of incongruities between the students' and the teacher's interpretations on the given ICF were also unveiled, but similarities of interpretations were still relatively greater. Likewise, it was revealed that the student-participants manifested strong positive viewpoint towards ICF and considered this as beneficial in improving their writing skills. This study, therefore, recommends to language teachers the use of ICF to help learners translate their writing difficulties into holistic skill and aid them in attaining both the content and performance standards in the area of academic writing.