Roles of Feedback to English Writing Improvement: Thai EFL Novice Writers in Higher Education

Abstract

Writing has been the most difficult skill among EFL students for several decades. It inevitably promotes writing feedback and approaches to English writing classroom to minimize students’ errors in their writing draft revision. Hereby, the current study aimed at investigating perceptions towards the three writing features: vocabulary, grammar, and content, and examining the differences of the three assessments including teacher feedback, peer feedback, and self-correction. In addition, the teacher feedback preference as implicit and explicit feedback was determined as well. Participants were 32 first-year undergraduate students majoring in English for International Communication at Rajamangala University of Technology, Lanna Tak, Thailand. The current study employed a mixed-method research approach. Questionnaires and open-ended questions were utilized as research tools. Participants were assigned three genres of writing paragraphs. It took 15 consecutive weeks in providing three different feedback to purposive samples. For every assignment, their peers corrected their first drafts and then they rechecked and edited their output by their own decision. Afterward, the teacher provided both implicit and explicit feedback on the revision process. The data obtained were quantitatively analyzed for mean, standard deviation, and a paired sample t-test which have been deployed to the differences among the three feedback. Correspondingly, all written responses were thematically grouped and transcribed into frequency and percentage. The findings indicated that students mostly expected the teacher to edit their misused words, grammatical errors, and ideas on their drafts. As for the three feedback, most beginning writers particularly believed that teacher feedback, which was followed by self-correction and peer feedback, was much necessary for writing improvement and teachers should edit their redrafts explicitly in an EFL writing classroom.