The quantitative findings in the present study were based on the analysis of students’
performances over three drafts of two essays. The qualitative information, on the other hand, was gathered from the 40 participants’ protocols, questionnaires and interviews. In the following, findings are summarized, highlighting answers to the research questions. The more significant findings are presented prior to less significant ones which are followed by extended discussions. The discussion is hoped to elicit viable pedagogical implications for EFL writing curriculum in senior high schools of Taiwan. Finally, the analysis of the limitation in this pedagogy-oriented study is intended for providing useful suggestions for future L2 writing studies and curriculum designs.
Summary of the Findings
In terms of participants’ short-term performance, both groups have shown enhancement in tense error reduction and the use of thesis statement. Students’ error ratios in tense usage diminished in the revised drafts; students who were treated with direct correction outperformed those treated with questions as TR. Furthermore, while only one student in the question-based group added his thesis statement in his revision, all students in the direct-correction group wrote their thesis statement in the revision. Thus, the immediate effects on students’ revision in the direct-correction group answer the first research question,
“Do different types of TR make differences in student’s revision?” As a whole, direct correction shows more instant influence on students’ revision than asking questions as TR.
Nevertheless, the interview with almost 14 students in the question-based group during
the whole study reveals that students receiving this type of TR showed more autonomy and interaction with the TR; they may choose not to follow the teacher’s question, or they may respond to the question by marking something in their revised drafts—they tried to tell the teacher that their thesis statement was not missing. The interactive nature of the question-based TR, though generating a lower ratio of error correction and fewer drafts with a thesis statement in the revision than direct correction, did give rise to more thinking about the meaning of the question provided in TR. On the contrary, students whose essays were directly corrected all accepted the teacher’s red marks; even though a couple of them objected to teacher’s correction, they still revised on the basis of the teacher’s direction. More obedience and less thinking were observed in the direct-correction group, which suggests the uncertain effect of the direct-correction TRs.
Therefore, we may conclude that question-based TR provides more interactive and consciousness-raising feedback to students while direct correction exerts immediate influence by providing correct answer to students’ errors or problems. The obedience to the TR in the direct-correction group results in greater progress in the revision in terms of tense error reduction and the use of thesis statement.
In view of the effect of grammar-focused TR, students in both group all performed well, suggesting that teacher response itself must have taken effect in some way, though the decrease in error ratio in the revision in the question-based group is lower than that of the direct-correction group. This positively answers the research question “Does grammar-focused TR help reduce students’ grammatical errors in revision?”
On the other hand, with respect to content-based TR, although only one student in the question-based group added an appropriate thesis statement in the revision, his response in the interview reveals the impact of the question, “Where is your thesis statement?” His meditation on this question later reminded himself of placing a thesis statement in the beginning of his new essay. In the case of this student, the content-focused TR in the form of
a question actually stimulated this student’s thinking process, which raised his consciousness of the need of a thesis statement in an essay. Therefore, despite the poverty of quantitative significance in the effect of content-focused TR on the revision or the new essay, qualitative analysis reflects a more sophisticated answer to the research question, “Does content-focused TR lead to students’ writing progress?”
However, in terms of carry-over impact, the effectiveness of the grammar-focused and content-focused TRs in the revision, overtly, did not carry over to the new essay, which answers the research question, “Does the effect of TR on students’ revision sustain” with a negation.
As a matter of fact, little research has provided direct and absolute evidence of sustainable effect of the teacher feedback (Kepner, 1991; Semke, 1984). In addition, as discussed in the chapter two, the positive findings from previous research were concerned with the effects of content-focused TR (e.g., Fathman & Whalley, 1990; Kepner, 1991;
Russikoff & Kogan, 1996; Semke, 1984). In other words, little research has reported the carry-over effect of the grammar-focused TR. Since this study has reported that the carry-over effect of the TR failed to sustain in the new essay, possible reasons for this result are thus scrutinized in the following.
Generally, it can be expounded from three perspectives: students’ attitude, students’
language proficiency, and time limitation. Students’ attitude includes their expectation for TR, their perception of the writing process and their motivation to write in English. Students’
language proficiency is involved because it partly determines students’ mastery of tense and their stance towards English writing convention. Finally, as time limitation hinders most students from thinking more thoroughly, students’ carelessness and Chinglish in their drafts turned to be understandable. The following are the above three aspects which are discussed in detail so as to explain students’ failure to apply what they learned from TRs to the new essay.
Students’ Attitude
As found in the previous chapter, most students took their first time of English writing seriously. They also showed their obedience to TR, particularly when facing teacher’s direct correction. Therefore, their attitude toward TR is undoubtedly friendly and compliant.
However, from students’ expectations for TR and alternative methods to writing instruction, there seems to be no common ground regarding TR shared by the students and the teacher.
That is, students expected different TRs from what the teacher had offered. Though students had reflected they knew what the teacher would like to focus on via TR, they still hoped to obtain other types of TR, such as responses accompanied with more detailed accounts or holistic comments. Some of them even hoped to have a face-to-face meeting, tutored by the teacher so that they could realize why they misused tenses in some more complicated contexts.
In addition, most students at this level were unable to use a thesis statement properly.
This also reflects students’ different attitude from the teacher’s toward how to write an essay.
Most students in the first year of the senior high school could not understand why they had to supply a thesis statement in the initiative part of an English essay. Some of them even argued that students at this level should “be encouraged to create” their own writing rather than “be forced to follow” the convention of essay writing. This is indeed a gap between L2 novice writers and L2 writing teachers.
The students’ unawareness of conventional rules was also reflected in their carelessness in writing process. Apparently, most students did not regard this writing cycle as a formal practice of academic writing but creative writing. In the cases of many students’ first essays, they referred to a day of bad weather as their gloomy moods or state of minds. It is clear that many students tried to express their feelings instead of describing what happened in a raining day. While the sentimental facets are highly focused, it is really hard for a novice writer to lay equal emphasis on the rule-governed aspects such as grammar checking and the use of a
thesis statement.
This also elicits another interesting issue which can determine the quality of a writing draft—motivation. With lower motivation to get a full score, which is always decided on the basis of the number of grammatical errors in a test, participants in this study turned to view this writing experience as a practice of creative writing. This also explains why some students expected to receive comments regarding how to improve their writing skills. They hoped to learn how to express themselves in English instead of learning how to correct grammar as they are always treated with13, since the requirement of grammatical accuracy has been highlighted in the regular English class.
Students’ Language Proficiency
According to the theory of SLA (Second Language Acquisition), students may show different language proficiencies at different phases; namely, their language proficiency is not always so fixed. The participants in this study also showed their unsteady ability to master the usage of tense, especially when they had just learned the tense usages several months before this research was conducted. With insufficient reading input and restricted practices of tense, students were found to perform inconsistently with regard to tense usage over the three drafts.
What is more, their shortage of input in English also impeded them from grasping the core of writing conventions of the target language. For students at a lower level, they are still struggling for language differences between L1 and L2. Expressing themselves in L2 has been a challenging task for them, not to mention the requirement of a formal writing format.
In consequence, a novice writer is actually less likely to narrate an error-free essay with a clear and proper thesis statement in the beginning of his/her writing career.
13 The participants in this senior high school are used to practicing Chinese-to-English translation after a lesson is finished. Their English teacher would ask them to correct their grammatical errors by themselves. After that, their translation practices are always double-checked by the teacher again.
Time Limitation
Since students at the lower language level are mostly unable to make error-free sentences in that language, they definitely have trouble writing an essay within a limited time span. To survive from this time limitation, many students turned to scratch their article in Chinglish. To complete their revision in time, students in the direct-correction group copied the teacher’s direction and on the other hand, students in the question-based group would ignore the question if it was too hard to answer. To finish the third essay in a 50-minute class, students wrote their passage in the way they did in Chinese writing, completely forgetting what they might have learned from TR. Indeed, under such time restriction, it rarely occurred to these novice writers that they should recall what they just learned from the TR and apply it.
Time limitation also explains students’ carelessness across the three drafts and some students’ unwillingness to compose the new essay better than the first one. The pressure from limited time may result in students’ unconsciousness of their grammatical errors and their inability to think about how to generate a proper thesis statement for their essay. As listed in the retrospective protocols, time constraint led students make tiny mistakes which they could have eschewed and made many of them tend to write their new essay with a more reckless attitude. Their willingness to perform well in the two previous drafts seemed to disappear in the new essay.
Interestingly, students’ positive attitudes in the questionnaire seem contradictory to the aforementioned. While most students self-evaluated their attitudes towards this writing cycle and even acclaimed that they had learned something and even made some progress because of the TR they received, what they actually did during the three drafts, by contrast, resulted in non-significant findings in this study. Silva (1993) has mentioned that L2 students showed less reviewing involvement, less rereading and less reflecting on written texts. Perhaps the results of this study can be explained from this perspective: students in this study did not involve themselves very much in reviewing and rereading their drafts and did not actually
reflect on their attitudes towards real writing and revising processes when filling out the questionnaire.
Finally, the study span also plays an important role in this investigation since this research intended to examine students’ writing performances between drafts. Students’
improvement may hardly be evident during this study span of less than two months.
Moreover, participants were just treated with TR “one time” and they were never informed of the exact reason why they had to write English essays in the middle of the semester. In other words, the possible effect of the TR may be eliminated or reduced as a result of time limitation.
To sum up, perhaps the key to facilitating students’ L2 writing is what Zamel (1985) has indicated: students must be provided the time and the opportunity to incorporate TR into revision and to apply TR across writing assignments. While students, novice writers in particular, are under constraint to do something new to them, they are unready to act in expectation.
Pedagogical Implications
As this research is pedagogy-oriented, implications from this study are discussed in this subsection. First of all, there is no denying that students at the lower level need a suitable revising setting to incorporate TR into the revised draft. Time restriction has been a great obstacle for students in this study; many students felt anxious and then turned to be careless during their writing process. Besides, the pressure from time limitation further aggravated students’ less capability of revising in an “intuitive manner,” i.e., revising on the basis of what “sounds” good (see Silva, 1993, p. 662). As a result, many students in the direct-correction group only copied the answers given by the teacher instead of further pondering on the problematic parts and making their passage more effective and natural.
Likewise, in the question-based group, though answering the question as TR correctly, many
of the students still failed to understand the real reason why the teacher asked such a question.
Consequently, it is improbably that students could “revise by ear” (Silva, 1993, p. 662) and revise in an intuitive way that native speakers always do as they are revising.
Secondly, TR is apparently indispensable for novice writers to revise their drafts. The participants in this study, in some way, indicated the need for more detailed TRs. When they were revising their first draft, they were inevitably depending upon the TR they received because they had no other resources to query. In this regard, the TR with the instructional nature is suggested. In other words, when oral instruction is unavailable, the key to success in facilitating students’ writing consists in whether the TR contains instructional messages. TR with detailed explanation, for instance, brings about more instructions for students. As face-to-face meetings are difficult for a 40-student class, the written TR with clear and informative instructions must help students with the problems or errors in their drafts.
Therefore, no matter how tight the schedule is, senior high school writing teachers still need to provide appropriate TR which could help students know where they may err and make them revise their drafts appropriately.
From this perspective, thirdly, TR which is embedded with an instructional message clearly pinpointing student’s problem in writing should be better than direct correction. In consequence, the value of the question-based TR adopted in this study turns to be more prominent since it implies the instructional potential, compared with the direct correction which may still confuse students who did not know why their sentence was corrected in the way it received. Asking questions can elicit students to think. As mentioned in the chapter four, question-based TR actually aroused many students’ awareness of their errors and problems. If this type of TR could be further amended to have more instructions such as explanation and clarification, this question-based TR must be able to facilitate more students’
writing ability.
What is more, thanks to the interactive nature of the question-based TR, students are
more likely to argue for themselves, whereas direct correction seems more authoritative for students because the standard answer has been directly given. This interactive nature also contributes to a closer relationship between students and the teacher; students felt more relaxed with the TR in the form of a question than those who received direct correction.
Fourthly, according to the participants’ questionnaire, curriculum design should conform to their needs. For students at the lower level, the pre-class activity must be well-organized in advance. Take brainstorming for example; by mutually sharing and discussing the possible direction and the content of the essay, novice writers could organize their ideas easily. Furthermore, brainstorming also helps elicit a thesis statement for an essay because via this activity, the teacher can facilitate students in constructing their article with a main idea followed by many supporting ideas.
In addition to prerequisite activity such as brainstorming, many students also responded that they expected a sample writing as a reference before they started their first draft.
Offering sample passages is a common technique in the writing class, especially when students are new to writing a certain genre. The reason why the teacher in this research did not provide any writing sample is that students may turn out to be limited to the writing style of that passage. However, as mentioned earlier, the sample writing can be a passage which shows students what grammatical item is focused and where the thesis statement should be placed in the essay. Accordingly, students are more likely to know what they should attend to in this phase of the writing process. In reality, a sample passage can also serve as a kind of post-writing activity. Since a well-organized passage with a thesis statement in the beginning can be demonstrated and expounded by the teacher, a passage with common errors that most students make frequently could be also openly discussed after writing. These are of great help for novice writers to improve their writing.
The last but not least implication is the role of a writing teacher in the English class of the senior high school. The teacher in this research is actually the English teacher of the
participants. Therefore, the essays adopted in this study were all written in the English class.
More specifically, there is no extra writing class for these participants. Without formal writing instruction, the participants wrote their essays mainly with the impression on English writing mentioned by their English teacher in class. As many students confessed that they wrote with intuition, it turns to be understandable that the results in this study did not turn out
More specifically, there is no extra writing class for these participants. Without formal writing instruction, the participants wrote their essays mainly with the impression on English writing mentioned by their English teacher in class. As many students confessed that they wrote with intuition, it turns to be understandable that the results in this study did not turn out