Written Corrective Feedback Strategies Employed by University English Lecturers: A Teacher Cognition Perspective

Wei Wei,Yiqian (Katherine) Cao

doi:10.1177/2158244020934886

Abstract

Examining EFL (English as a foreign language) teachers’ beliefs and cognition has become an essential area of research as teachers are seen as active decision makers. This study addresses teachers’ beliefs as specific to the strategies they employ when providing corrective feedback to students’ writing. Drawing on Ellis’s typology of written corrective feedback and Borg’s teacher cognition theory, this survey study investigated university EFL lecturers’ self-reported strategy use in the provision of feedback to students’ written compositions. A total of 254 respondents completed this survey from universities in Thailand, China, and Vietnam. The findings showed that the teachers provided different types of strategies, namely, high-demand (e.g., students’ response to feedback required), low-demand (e.g., correcting all errors), and no-demand feedback in relation to their students’ proficiency levels. Their choices of high-demand feedback strategies seemed to be associated with their pre- and in-service professional training experiences as well as contextual factors including local cultural influence and limited resources; whereas their uses of no-demand and low-demand feedback strategies seemed to be associated with their prior language learning experiences and classroom teaching practice. This study also revealed an inconsistency between teachers’ cognition about provision of feedback and their reported feedback strategy use. Pedagogical implications and directions for future research were also proposed.

Highlights

Written corrective feedback (WCF) has received an increasing amount of attention in the fields of second language (L2) writing and L2 acquisition (Bitchener & Storch, 2016; Papi et al, 2020)
Previous research in this context focused on EFL (English as a foreign language) teachers’ feedback practice at primary and secondary school level (e.g., Lee, 2004, 2008b; Furneaux et al, 2007), suggesting that the direct feedback strategy targeting grammatical errors was widely employed in Hong Kong, Vietnam, Thailand, and China even though its effectiveness was questioned by some researchers (e.g., Mao & Crosthwaite, 2019; Shintani & Ellis, 2013)
At the individual strategy level, the EFL teachers seem to prefer using a combination of direct and indirect feedback strategies; for example, in the top five most frequently used feedback strategies, three of them relate to correcting mistakes for students, while two of them refer to a more indirect approach, such as giving students opportunities to identify and correct them by themselves

Summary

Introduction

Written corrective feedback (WCF) has received an increasing amount of attention in the fields of second language (L2) writing and L2 acquisition (Bitchener & Storch, 2016; Papi et al, 2020). It is hypothesized that university lecturers employ very different feedback strategies from secondary school teachers in these Asian countries for the following reasons: First of all, the assumptions behind the wide use of direct error-focused feedback strategies in Asian countries have been challenged in the higher education context for years Previous research in this context focused on EFL (English as a foreign language) teachers’ feedback practice at primary and secondary school level (e.g., Lee, 2004, 2008b; Furneaux et al, 2007), suggesting that the direct feedback strategy targeting grammatical errors was widely employed in Hong Kong, Vietnam, Thailand, and China even though its effectiveness was questioned by some researchers (e.g., Mao & Crosthwaite, 2019; Shintani & Ellis, 2013).

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion