Although teacher feedback is generally considered to play an important role in the development of students' writing abilities, recent research is increasingly showing that its effectiveness very much depends on how well it matches students' concerns. One technique especially suitable to determine these concerns is to encourage students to self-monitor their own written production by means of annotations. In this study, we analyzed the annotations made by two groups of EFL secondary school students at different levels of proficiency while writing an expository text. Both groups used requests for translation as the basic annotation technique and their annotations were mainly focused on syntax and lexis, but proficiency-related differences were also found in the average number of annotations made and in the attention paid to discourse and organization. These findings are empirically discussed and a number of pedagogical recommendations are suggested.