Abstract
The purpose of this study is to explore the perspectives of 86 Saudi EFL freshmen towards their teachers’ response to their writing. The participants’ input has been collected via a questionnaire to shed light on the factors that influence students’ attitudes about writing in English as a foreign language. The study found that the students were willing to read their essays again after the teacher commented on them which could be a sign that they realized a great value in their teacher’s written comments. The participants asserted that they thought carefully about the teacher’s comments and corrections which might be taken as an indication that those students considered their teacher response a great help to gain confidence in themselves as good writers. In addition, they mentioned that they paid more attention to teacher response on both surface-level errors and meaning-level errors. This was perhaps due to response effectiveness in helping them produce better writing with less mistakes. The participants also mentioned that all types of teacher response were important to them which could indicate positive attitudes toward such response on their writing and its role in developing the necessary skills to improve their writing proficiency. The study recommended that writing teachers should utilize feedback to student writing as a motivating factor to help students revise their drafts by providing focused and clear response, not over-stressing the correction of errors, and enhancing the feedback value with student-teacher conferences. Teaching conditions should be improved by reducing the number of students in writing classes and reducing other work obligations.
Highlights
Writing is one of the most important skills that students of English as a second language (ESL) or English as a Foreign Language (EFL) need to develop in order to enhance their efforts to learn the target language and elevate their L2 proficiency
This study investigated the perspectives of Saudi ESL freshmen towards their teachers’ response to their writing
Eighty six participants responded to a questionnaire that had been used in previous studies
Summary
Writing is one of the most important skills that students of English as a second language (ESL) or English as a Foreign Language (EFL) need to develop in order to enhance their efforts to learn the target language and elevate their L2 proficiency. Teacher response to student writing is a basic element in the process-oriented approach to writing where the focus of teaching writing has shifted from product to process (Applebee, 1986; Jacobs & Farrell, 2001) This means that instead of looking at the final product of students’ writing, teachers look at their writing process instead of grading the final product. ● Teacher response was found helpful to make students more conscious of the recursive nature of the writing process, motivate students to write multiple drafts and revise their writing several times in order to produce a much improved piece of writing (Russell & Spada, 2006)
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