The Impact of Teacher E-Feedback on Students’ Writing: A Waste of Time or a Road to Success?

Abstract

Academic writing is one of the writing skills that has been taught traditionally via face-to-face physical classroom settings. However, with the new advances in educational technologies, online teaching and learning have entered the realms of educational institutions and they are not nowadays considered a foreign aspect. Especially in the last two years of great home-confinements due to the Covid-19 pandemic, teaching and learning in the online world have turned into an inescapable solution. The implementation of online teaching and learning has brought the teachers to a new avenue of teaching writing especially in the aspect of giving feedback to students’ writing. The purpose of this study was to investigate the effectiveness of electronic feedback (e-feedback) provided by instructors on their students’ writing in an English for Academic Purposes (EAP) class. The Learning Management System (LMS) was used by the students to submit their writings, and the instructors provided online feedback using the system. The results mainly show that the students benefited from receiving different forms of feedback using the system and the instructors found freedom to provide as much feedback as provided for different purposes. The results of this study indicate that e-feedback practices should be implemented more in language classes and teachers must receive training to improve their knowledge and skills in the practice to be able to use different feedback tools and resources to achieve different ends on their students.