Volume 10 (2019) Issue 2, pp. 133-155
Unpacking Meaningful Grammar Feedback:
An Analysis of EFL Student Teachers’ Feedback Preferences and Learning Moments
Michel Cabot (Oslo, Norway)
Abstract
Writing research has acknowledged the value of formative grammar feedback in English-as-a-foreign-language teacher writing education. Yet we know little about perceptions of the understanding and use of such meaningful feedback. To fill this research gap, two pilot interviews, ten semi-structured and four member-check interviews were carried out with twelve student teachers in Western Norway. To unpack feedback perceptions, students used two different essays as prompts (the first with written and oral feedback, the second without any feedback). The findings reveal that students favoured feedback that pushed them cognitively and combined different feedback modes and types. Moreover, they commented positively on repetitive feedback with a high focus on accuracy. Students’ awareness and the concreteness of the feedback given played important roles in the perception of learning moments. To discuss the findings, ecological-agentic theories were integrated with linguo-didactic theories. This study may inspire those instructors who wish to develop their feedback practices.
Keywords: EFL feedback perceptions, EFL grammar feedback, written corrective feedback (WCF), conference feedback, EFL teacher education
Introduction
This article presents a qualitative study of student English teachers’ perceptions of grammar feedback in English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) writing as part of assessment for learning (AFL) or formative assessment (FA) activities. An essential element of AFL or FA is that student teachers actively use the provided feedback "to alter the gap between actual level and reference level" (Sadler 1989: 121). In other words, the meaningfulness or success of formative grammar feedback depends on the student teachers’ understanding of and their ability to use the grammar comments provided. In this respect, weaknesses can explain why student teachers often make little use of feedback (e.g. Mackey, Gass & McDonough 2000). This makes it imperative to learn more about the reception of formative EFL grammar feedback in writing education, internationally as well as locally, in this case in Norway.
Ample research shows the positive benefits of grammar feedback, which justifies focusing more clearly on it in teacher writing education (e.g. Ellis, Sheen, Murakami & Takashima 2008). One benefit is that student teachers improve their texts in terms of accuracy at local levels or comprehensibility at global levels (Montgomery & Baker 2007). Another benefit is the general improvement of grammatical knowledge, i.e. metalinguistic (knowledge about language) and metalingual knowledge (knowledge of metalanguage) (Berry 2005). In particular, the knowledge of basic terminology is a matter of international concern (e.g. Borg 2015).
Accordingly, the present study is informed by the following assertions:
● Meaningful grammar feedback may help student teachers not only to use the provided feedback for their own writing improvement but also for their own future teaching and development of feedback practices (procedural knowledge).
● These future teachers need to ensure they understand and know enough about grammar to improve their own and their students’ writing (declarative knowledge).
Against this background, it is important to extend our knowledge about students’ perceptions of feedback in EFL writing instruction. To this end, the present study investigates the relationship between feedback preferences and learning moments. It draws on ecological-agentic and linguo-didactic perspectives on learning as theoretical lenses. In the following sections, these concepts will be outlined before existing research is reviewed. The student teachers’ self-perceived characteristics of preferred grammar feedback and their perceptions of essential learning moments are presented after a description of the study’s design and methods. This study concludes with a discussion of meaningful EFL grammar feedback in teacher education.
1 Theoretical Framework
1.1 Meaningful Feedback in an Ecological-Agentic Perspective of Learning
The current study takes place within a learning ecology framework. Van Lier defines learning ecology as an approach that looks
at the learning process, the actions and activities of teachers and learners, the multi-layered nature of interaction and language use, in all their complexity and as a network of interdependencies among all the elements in the setting. (Van Lier 2010: 3)
In this context, written and oral feedback situations may represent different meaningful learning opportunities in a learning ecology and play a major role in writing development. More specifically, the present study uses theories on agency to analyse such meaningful learning situations (hereafter called learning moments).
Arguably, agency is a multifaceted term (e.g. Biesta & Tedder 2006). Van Lier (2010: 4) defines agency as "a movement, a change of state or direction, or even a lack of movement where movement is expected". This definition resembles one of the two conceptual perspectives of agency elaborated by Goller and Harteis (2017: 88): agency "as something individuals do" in contrast to agency "as a personal feature". Similarly, this research understands agency as a mainly situation-specific or contextual transaction between an actor, i.e. the feedback recipient, and a structure, i.e. the feedback situation itself. We can thus map an analysis of agency linked to grammar feedback as follows:
Figure 1: Complex Representation of Agency Based on Emirbayer and Mische (1998)
As illustrated above, the dynamic interplay between iterational elements (past habits), practical-evaluative elements (present judgment) and projective elements (future imagination) characterises the transaction between students and grammar feedback (Emirbayer & Mische 1998: 963). The present study uses this conceptualisation of agency as a reference point for in-depth interviews. It examines the above-mentioned three elements drawing on the insights from the informants’ perceptions of their first and second essays and their resulting thoughts about future writings.
1.2 Meaningful Feedback in a Linguo-Didactic Perspective
In contrast to ecological perspectives focusing more on interactions in a large setting, a linguo-didactic approach provides a more elaborate in-depth analysis of meaningful feedback at the sublevel. For example, meaningful formative feedback is not meaningful a priori but becomes meaningful to student teachers through the understanding of and the ability to use the feedback provided. It has a great deal in common with "fine-tuned feedback" (Han 2001: 584). Han describes fine-tuned feedback as a
process whereby the provider of corrective feedback (CF) tunes in to the true causal factors of an error and successfully brings the learner’s attention to the learning problem. (Han 2001: 584)
According to several researchers (e.g. Doughty 1994, Kepner 1991, Lee 2007, Lee, Mak & Burns 2015), there is still a relatively scarce amount of research on ‘fine-tuning’ feedback associated with EFL grammar as a part of a formative assessment. One reason might be that it is too ambitious to find the true causal factors of an error and integrate them into our feedback. However, the very concept of attempting to fine-tune feedback is interesting because it makes feedback meaningful to the learners.
Furthermore, input-providing versus output-pushing feedback dichotomies (Ellis 2010: 338) are useful in our attempt to analyse feedback perceptions. For example, Lyster (2004) distinguishes between recasts (input-providing), which provide learners with corrected grammar mistakes, and elicitations (output-pushing), by which learners are asked to reformulate their utterances and correct them. The latter cases are particularly meaningful in oral conferencing.
In fact, Swain (2000) classifies three functions of output: the noticing function, the hypothesis-formulation function, and the metalinguistic function. In the first function, English learners become aware of what they do not know or know only partially. This can occur when students suddenly discover that they cannot distinguish adverbs from adjectives, for example. In the second function, English learners have the opportunity to test out new structures or terminology related to error treatment (e.g. run-ons or concord) with the teacher. The third function refers to a reflective or cognitive process – that is, a negotiation over form and meaning. An illustrative example might be discussions between teachers and students on the change of meaning when using the infinitive or the gerund after verbs (e.g. ‘I remembered to do it’ vs ‘I remembered doing it’). Such ‘collaborative dialogues’ in oral conferencing are pushed-output situations which are beneficial for learning English.
2 Existing Research
Research related to meaningful grammar feedback looks into both content (grammar) and pedagogical (feedback) questions. Concerning content, Thepseenu & Roehr’s (2015: 110) research reveals that university-level learners hold positive beliefs about the explicit teaching and learning of grammar. They consider grammar important for mastering the second language (L2), for writing in the L2, for accurate use of the L2 and for self-correction. Concerning pedagogical questions, several studies on feedback show that students believe feedback is helpful, and they use it to improve their L2 writing (e.g. Hyland & Hyland 2006, Straub 1997).
Other studies, however, reveal that learners often make little use of teacher feedback (e.g. Mackey, Gass & McDonough 2000: 296). These disparate results indicate that the problem of meaningful grammar feedback needs further exploration.
Furthermore, the present article’s definition of meaningful grammar feedback integrates studies on feedback types and modes. Regarding feedback types, students’ use of and preference for different types of feedback have been examined in several studies (e.g. Bitchener, Young & Cameron 2005, Liu 2009, Yoshida 2008). Most interestingly, Liu’s (2009) data – obtained through a questionnaire and interviews at a university in the United States – indicate that students expect error treatment to be more extensive or unfocused. In other words, they want the teacher to point out all grammar errors in their written corrective feedback (WCF). Furthermore, Yoshida (2008) used audio recordings and stimulated recall interviews in Australia to suggest that learners’ preferences involved clarifications and elicitations to work out the correct answers themselves.
Concerning feedback modes, some studies suggest that students give higher ratings on the helpfulness and success of oral corrective feedback (OCF) in conferences because written feedback sometimes appears ambiguous to learners (e.g. Bitchener, Young & Cameron 2005, Weissberg 2006, Yeh 2016). For example, Yeh (2016) collected data through questionnaires of 34 EFL college students from two English writing classes. The study indicates a generally positive experience of writing conferences, most significantly due to the frequent use of direct CF, i.e. providing the correct form. Whilst research on writing conferences remains relatively low (Cabot & Kaldestad 2019, Ferris 2014), studies focusing on student views, such as Yeh’s study, are even rarer.
Most of the above-mentioned studies vary in terms of results, research design and target language. However, fewer studies focus on specific aspects of feedback preferences and the phenomena of self-perceived essential learning moments. Furthermore, no study could be found that integrated ecological perspectives with linguo-didactic theories of grammar feedback. From our point of view, these research areas – learning ecologies and linguo-didactic theories in EFL – seem to exist separately. Research might benefit from a sharper focus on possible links between these two theory strands.
3 Research Questions
The purpose of this study is to investigate EFL student teachers’ perceptions of grammar feedback. More specifically, we are concerned with what role grammar feedback plays, and how it becomes meaningful in student teachers’ self-perceived learning ecologies. This study therefore addresses the following research questions:
1. What are the characteristics of the feedback that students prefer?
2. How do students link these preferences to learning moments in their writing development?
4 Design and Methods
4.1 Design and Procedures
In this study, a qualitative research design is used. The main data consists of two pilot interviews, ten semi-structured in-depth interviews and four member-check interviews in which 12 students – enrolled in 2017 at a university college in Western Norway – discussed and reflected on the role of meaningful feedback and possible learner uptake. These in-depth interviews used two different literary essays of 750 to 1,100 words as prompts. The essay subjects were the short story The Daughters of the Late Colonel, the novels Things Fall Apart, Angela’s Ashes, 1984 or the play Macbeth. The Essay 1 submissions included written corrective feedback (WCF) and oral corrective feedback (OCF), whilst the Essay 2 submissions, written two months later, came without any grammar feedback.
Primarily based on the interviews, the present self-report study aims to analyse students’ reflections on their past (Essay 1), present (Essay 2) and future writing. The interviews may thus constitute qualified verbal report data with a particular focus on "introspective and retrospective self-observation" (Cohen 1998: 34). Due to the different time frames between the different data sources, the reflective interviews may also represent stimulated recall (SR) interviews with a delayed recall. Consisting of multiple data sources (i.e. essay 2 without any feedback and essay 1 with WCF) in addition to audio recordings and transcripts from OCF (on essay 1), the stimulus of the interviews can be qualified as strong (Gass & Mackey 2017: 52).
4.2 Participants
The following table provides an overview of the participant sample:
Number
|
Experience
| |
Student Teachers
|
10
5 males: Brad, Dennis, John, Roger, Tom
5 females: Eva, Faith, Grace, Pauline, Ruth
|
Fourth-year students in teacher education – EFL was their third subject (in addition to pedagogy); approximately 11 years of EFL at school
|
Table 1: Profile of the Informants in the Study
All student teachers, for whom pseudonyms are used here, had attended Norwegian schools where they had approximately 11 years of EFL education. The teacher taught grammar and literature to the same group of student teachers. To enhance ecological validity, a 15-credit course in English literature, culture and civilisation was chosen, in which students customarily write an essay every spring term. Therefore, the study approximated the real world by not intervening in the regular teaching of EFL teacher education.
4.3 Semi-Structured Interview Guide
Ellis’s (2009) and Lyster & Ranta’s (1997) taxonomies on feedback types and modes served as a starting point to ask questions. Accordingly, the informants were asked about their perceptions of the following corrective feedback (CF):
● focused vs. unfocused CF (correcting fewer or more than five error categories)
● Direct CF (providing the correct form) vs. Indirect CF (no correction but only indicating the existence of an error)
● Metalinguistic CF (use of metalanguage)
● elicitation-based CF (allowing student to fill in the blank, asking a question to elicit knowledge or asking to reformulate)
The interview guide (Appendix A) contained three parts. The first included questions related to Essay 1’s WCF (i.e. marginal, in-text and end comments) and OCF. The second part dealt with the perceptions of positive and negative uptake in Essay 2. The third one aimed at mapping and describing the projective future after writing these two essays. In all parts, essential moments of learning were elicited. Guiding questions were only used in the member-check interviews to confirm the findings.
4.4 Analysis
For data analysis of the present "narrative research" (Creswell & Poth 2018: 67), a qualitative codebook using NVivo 11 was developed. This codebook on data sources facilitated a comparison across time. The coding may therefore qualify as "longitudinal coding" (Saldaña 2015: 236). More specifically, the codes fell into written vs. oral, direct vs. indirect, focused vs. unfocused, metalinguistic and elicitation-based CF. The coding used in the present study was both open and axial. For example, the answers to the question when and why students valued direct feedback came directly from the data. Thus, these findings mainly derive from open coding. However, the description of the relationship between moments of meaningful feedback, such as focused and unfocused feedback, came from the researcher’s interpretation. In this case, coding was more axial because – as illustrated in Figure 2 – categories and concepts were related to each other via a combination of inductive and deductive thinking (Silverman 2014: 112).
The current study has limitations that affect the interpretation or generalisation of the results:
● Only a single course with one teacher, ten students and two essays underwent scrutiny. Thus, the study does not provide an exhaustive picture of Norwegian teacher education in general, or more specifically, all grammar feedback perceptions within these students’ learning ecologies.
● Self-reports may frequently have validity problems because the evidence comes from what the informant thinks and remembers (Mays & Pope 1995).
● There may exist possible causality issues relating to the description of learner uptake, which may be influenced by a plethora of factors, e.g. time, context, topic of the essay and preparation.
To a certain degree, the present enquiry establishes theoretical validity by relating the data to Emirbayer & Mische’s (1998) temporal-relational conceptualisation of agency and Ellis’s (2009) and Lyster & Ranta’s (1997) taxonomies on feedback. In addition, three techniques enhanced the qualitative data analysis of this study: testing rival explanations, negative cases and triangulations (Patton 1999). Rival explanations arose when the interviewees contrasted WCF (e.g. written metalinguistic end comments) to OCF (e.g. oral metalinguistic explanations). Furthermore, this study searched for negative cases by focusing not only on reasons for appreciating but also for not appreciating certain feedback types and modes.
Finally, this study employed triangulation methods, which involved the use of three different kinds of secondary data: analysis of WCF (Essay 1), OCF (Essay 1) and learner uptake (Essay 2). In addition, the researcher discussed the ten SR interviews with peers and validated them via two pilot interviews and four member-checking interviews, thus improving the credibility and reliability of this research (Silverman 2014: 76).
5 Findings
This section presents student teachers’ reflections on the relationship between the feedback received and their writing development extending from Essay 1 (with written and oral CF) and Essay 2 (without any CF) to self-perceived future essays.
In terms of general findings, it is worth mentioning that all students considered both WCF and OCF on eight different errors (word classes, incomplete and unclear sentences, run-ons, tense shifts, apostrophes, prepositions and concord; Appendix B) meaningful, especially the combination of OCF and WCF. However, they asked for more unfocused CF in in-text comments, more metalinguistic feedback in the margin and more elicitative questions in both WCF and OCF. They commented negatively on the use of indirect CF, and positively on the focused end comments. The interviewees were satisfied with all oral metalinguistic feedback but required more metalinguistic feedback combined with elicitations.
The first part of the following sections elaborates on the characteristics of the preferred feedback (Research Question 1). The second part describes how students link these feedback preferences to essential learning moments in their writing development (Research Question 2).
5.1 Characteristics of Preferred Feedback
In general, students valued several aspects of the teacher’s feedback practices. The following table summarises the feedback characteristics that student teachers preferred:
Student Teachers (n=10)
|
Cognitive Push
|
Complementarity
|
Iterativity
|
Real-world writing
|
Understand-ability
|
Brad
|
5
|
2
|
4
|
0
|
4
|
Dennis
|
0
|
3
|
1
|
2
|
2
|
Eva
|
3
|
4
|
3
|
3
|
3
|
Faith
|
3
|
4
|
2
|
3
|
3
|
Grace
|
5
|
2
|
4
|
4
|
5
|
John
|
5
|
3
|
0
|
2
|
5
|
Pauline
|
5
|
2
|
2
|
2
|
7
|
Roger
|
4
|
3
|
2
|
2
|
6
|
Ruth
|
1
|
3
|
3
|
2
|
3
|
Tom
|
2
|
3
|
5
|
0
|
4
|
 |
2.9
|
2.9
|
2.6
|
2
|
4.2
|
Table 2: Characteristics of Preferred Feedback
(Note: the numbers relate to coding occurrences in NVivo)
As shown in the table above, most student teachers – with a minimal average score of two coding references – indicated five aspects of feedback preferences. Real-world writing had the lowest (X = 2) and understandability the highest (X = 4.2) average score.
Concerning the first aspect, the cognitive pushes code was used when student teachers valued being urged to think and reflect on grammar issues. Here, elicitative CF seemed to be more successful in OCF than in WCF. Examples from three interviews are used to illustrate this issue.
The student teacher Faith thought the OCF "forced her somehow to think" when the teacher raised his voice to repeat the wrong relative pronoun "*who" in the sentence, "He doesn’t really regret it because he needs it more than *who he stole from." Faith guessed "whom" instead of "who" and had to discuss the difference between relative pronouns used as subjects or as objects with the teacher. The informant considered this beneficial for her learning.
The student teacher Tom appreciated the use of a question to explain the problem of the written comment "concord" when the teacher asked him "Is your subject in the plural or singular?"
Brad, on the other hand, remembered that at two different instances in Essay 1, the teacher asked him "What is the difference between 'reluctant' and 'reluctance' here and 'choice' and 'choose' there?" Such questions made Brad reflect on the use of different word classes throughout his essay in a more global approach.
The second aspect, i.e. complementarity, intertwined with understandability. For example, Grace described these phenomena when commenting on the benefit of metalinguistic oral conferencing:
Interviewer: Is there something that you did not understand in the written feedback but that became much more understandable in the conversation you had with the teacher [during the writing conference]?
Grace: Yes, for example, the feedback ‘incomplete sentence’ – you see that the sentence is completely wrong. And I get the opportunity to reformulate the sentences and to check my suggested corrections with the teacher. We talked a lot about ‘incomplete sentences’ and ‘missing verbals’. I understand now [after the writing conference] that this is very common in oral but not in written speech.
Similarly, Brad shared Grace’s opinion and seemed to appreciate OCF because the teacher explained the mistakes to him using other examples, which greatly increased his understanding of different word classes.
Interestingly, some student teachers linked complementarity to the feedback types direct or indirect CF (providing corrections or only indicating that an error exists). In fact, most student teachers thought it was important to provide the right answers during oral conferencing. For example, Grace posited that oral direct feedback actually improved her text because the feedback was more concrete and accurate. She admitted that written indirect feedback alone would often not have any effect on her because she was too lazy to look up things. Many student teachers shared Grace’s feelings and qualified indirect feedback as ‘frustrating’. Accordingly, Eva provided an interesting example of a problematic use of indirect WCF in the case of wrong -ing forms. Here, the direct feedback during OCF compensated for the indirect feedback in the WCF. Eva describes the benefit of OCF as follows:
Interviewer: Was there anything that you did not understand in the WCF but understood first after the oral feedback?
Eva: There were these double-waved underlinings, for example, under the word "becoming' here in the sentence, "Malachy’s storytelling inspired Frank to write stories himself, and to becoming an author". Indirect feedback is not a good choice here in my opinion. In this case, it was absolutely essential for me to have oral conferencing because the teacher provided the correct form and explained in more detail why it was not possible to use the -ing form in this sentence.
In contrast to Eva’s perceptions, Ruth was the only student teacher who understood that the use of indirect feedback might increase learning:
Ruth: Here, the teacher underlined the verb have in my sentence "Everybody have to take choices". We have talked a lot about concord problems and the fact that we have to be even more careful in English because Norwegian does not have many verb endings. It is easy for my foreign boyfriend to learn jeg har, du har, han har… I understood at once what was wrong in this sentence. When you can easily guess the correction, indirect feedback might be a good choice. It gives you the opportunity to correct it yourself and to reflect about it.
According to Ruth, this means that the feedback provider has to gauge student teacher’s understanding in advance or somehow make sure that the right answers are not too difficult to guess. Otherwise, the use of indirect feedback will become ineffective.
Regarding the third aspect, i.e. iterativity, the informants qualified the recurrent use of terms, such as concord, which the teacher had explained several times, as beneficial to their learning. Such use of repeated metalinguistic explanations was necessary according to Pauline because it led to more learning uptake (Appendix B) in other writing activities.
Concerning the fourth aspect, i.e. real-world writing, most students stressed the importance of unfocused CF (correcting more than five error categories). Grace confirmed these positive feelings:
Researcher: How challenging or difficult was it when the teacher went through each single error in the text?
Grace: It wasn’t challenging – not at all. We students here at a university college, we even expect teacher comments on every single error. As future teachers, we have to be able to write texts without any mistakes.
This aspect of linking the feedback to their future writing as teachers was particularly important. Student teachers want to be prepared for real-life situations, and in this sense, the use of unfocused feedback relates to product-oriented assessment. Conversely, Faith emphasised the importance of focused CF in the end comments:
Faith: I think it is smart to provide end comments because you somehow get a summary of what you struggle with, and this is concrete … for example, the fact that here, I have to use more full stops. It is very smart to emphasise what you can improve in the next texts you write.
This example shows that some student teachers appreciated focused CF because they thought it helped them to avoid future errors. Here, assessment seems to be process-oriented. In sum, both the product-oriented approach with unfocused CF and the process-oriented approach with focused CF were meaningful to student teachers.
The last aspect, i.e. understandability, had the highest average score in the number of coding references (X = 4.2). Interestingly, most student teachers linked understandability to metalinguistic CF (using metalanguage). Students qualified such feedback as "very useful" when they were acquainted with the terms or when the teacher used self-explanatory terms (e.g. sentence too long) in both WCF and OCF.
In the following section, the research scope will be narrowed down to an in-depth analysis of the relationship between the above-mentioned characteristics of the feedback that the student teachers of this study preferred and self-perceived learning moments.
5.2 Perceptions of Learning Moments
In terms of general findings, it is worth mentioning that all student teachers reported on essential and non-essential learning moments both in relation to Essay 1 (with WCF and OCF) and Essay 2 (without WCF and OCF). Those moments in which student teachers qualified the feedback situation as beneficial to their learning, were labeled as "essential". Concerning possible factors affording such moments, the following table illustrates the NVivo frequency count identified in the interviews with student teachers:
Student Teachers
(n=10)
|
Awareness
|
Concreteness
|
Sustainability
|
Brad
|
3
|
2
|
3
|
Dennis
|
1
|
4
|
3
|
Eva
|
4
|
6
|
2
|
Faith
|
2
|
7
|
1
|
Grace
|
3
|
7
|
6
|
John
|
4
|
6
|
3
|
Pauline
|
3
|
3
|
2
|
Roger
|
2
|
5
|
3
|
Ruth
|
4
|
4
|
8
|
Tom
|
3
|
5
|
2
|
2.9
|
4.9
|
3.3
|
Table 3: Factors Affording Essential Learning Moments
(Note: the numbers relate to coding occurrences in NVivo)
As can be seen, with more than two coding references (X = 2.9), the student teachers predominantly linked essential learning moments to the following three self-perceived factors: awareness, concreteness and sustainability. Grace described the first factor, awareness, in the following words:
Interviewer: Do you actually remember that you checked Essay 2 on incomplete sentences before submitting it?
Grace: Yes, indeed. I actually took away several sentences because I finally saw the errors. The interesting fact is this awareness while writing, the fact that you pay more attention to it.
Interviewer: How would you describe this moment when you revised your text and actually used the feedback?
Grace: I finally understood what an incomplete sentence is. It was like shouting "Eureka, finally I understand it!" My learning somehow jumped.
As expressed in the excerpt above, Grace used the term awareness herself in the interview to describe how she experienced an essential learning moment. Here, the perception of an essential learning moment showed an interesting link to a possible learner uptake between Essay 1 and Essay 2 (Appendix B). Grace had indeed managed to reduce the number of incomplete sentences from seven to three.
Faith, on the other hand, reported a lack of awareness, which possibly explains her negative learner uptake when using the apostrophe (’s-genitive) (Appendix B). During the interview, she realised that one of the reasons for her negative learner uptake could be that she had not concentrated enough during the OCF and thus had not really understood the metalinguistic CF provided in Essay 1.
However, Faith reported a second factor that led to essential learning moments:
Faith: I was very embarrassed when I discovered that I wrote "i" with small letters until now, at university college. I read in the margin, "capital letter". Why on earth did nobody tell me that before? Finally, I think I wrote "I" correctly in the second essay. It is very important that feedback is concrete and that we correct mistakes instead of only underlining them.
As seen above, Faith used the adjective concrete in the interview and thus concreteness was coded as a possible factor, similarly to other cases where the informants used synonyms for the adjective concrete. In fact, concreteness had the highest score of coding references (X = 4.2) in all interviews. Interestingly, student teachers often mentioned direct and metalinguistic feedback to substantiate concreteness.
The third factor related to the particular use of unfocused and focused feedback. It was labeled sustainability when students linked their perceptions of past or present learning moments to future learning needs. An example from Ruth’s interview illustrates this point:
Interviewer: But do you see any advantage of providing grammar feedback when we teachers comment on a text?
Ruth: Yes, undoubtedly – especially when we went through all comments during the writing conference mistake by mistake. This was very useful. I think this was one of the reasons for having fewer mistakes in the second essay. This is what we will have to do as teachers. We will have to be able to provide good explanations on every single error, even spontaneously. He trained us very well in providing good feedback comments to future students.
As the above excerpt shows, unfocused feedback might prepare student teachers for providing meaningful feedback in the future. Here, the focus is product-oriented because the final performance of a future feedback provider is at stake.
Conversely, Roger thought focused CF provoked other interesting learning moments. He emphasised grammar checks before submitting Essay 2, in which he tried to consider all the issues pinpointed in the WCF and OCF of Essay 1:
Interviewer: Are there any concrete grammatical explanations provided by your teacher you did use while writing the second essay?
Roger: Yes, I tried to avoid these incomplete sentences. I tried to make these sentences more complete, for example, by checking whether they had a subject and a verb. I think that the focused end comments have helped me to reduce the numbers of mistakes in the second essay. And it will help me in the future. It is like a "tool kit".
Therefore, a process-oriented approach standing in contrast to the above-mentioned product-oriented approach might be equally important. In other words, the future feedback provider is a learner himself, and he has to develop his EFL grammatical accuracy. On the one hand, the question is whether student teachers first have to improve their own grammatical accuracy to become good feedback providers (i.e. a process approach). On the other hand, this process may take place contemporaneously with product-oriented assessment in which the student teacher learns how to provide good feedback by knowing and understanding all the correct answers. The data provided by the present study do not give an answer to this highly complex question, but they convincingly reveal the fact that students considered both approaches as meaningful for any future writing improvement.
In the following sections, the findings will be discussed in relation to those characteristics of feedback preferences and to perceptions of essential and non-essential learning moments.
In the following sections, the findings will be discussed in relation to those characteristics of feedback preferences and to perceptions of essential and non-essential learning moments.
6 Discussion
The current study revealed three main findings concerning characteristics of feedback preferences (Research Question 1) and perceptions of learning moments (Research Question 2):
● The findings indicate a generally high appreciation of direct and metalinguistic feedback because student teachers seldom made the effort to look up grammar issues marked with indirect feedback, and metalanguage seemed to increase concreteness.
● Most student teachers greatly appreciated the use of elicitations because of cognitive pushes.
● All student teachers liked both focused and unfocused CF because they expected the feedback to help them improve their grammatical accuracy and to include all errors and mistakes, as is the case with extensive proofreading in the real world.
Concerning Research Question 2, many student teachers reported on essential learning moments associated with metalinguistic, direct and unfocused feedback. The following two sections shed light on student teachers’ perceptions through two lenses: an ecological and a linguo-didactic perspective of learning.
6.1 Ecological Issues of Meaningful or Non-Meaningful Feedback
This study examines meaningful and non-meaningful feedback in relation to feedback types and modes, and the relationship between specific aspects of feedback preferences and self-perceived learning moments. These learning moments represent perceptions of "a movement, a change of state or direction, or even a lack of movement where movement is expected" (Van Lier 2010: 4) in the student teachers’ learning ecologies. As stated above, three self-perceived factors provided learning moments. In this context, it is interesting to note that two of these factors (sustainability and concreteness) relate to the feedback, whilst one factor (awareness) relates to the student teacher. In other words, learning moments are mainly situation-specific and involve both the feedback recipient and the feedback situation (Figure 1). Such learning moments are of particular interest when they interact between different situations and thus become meaningful in student teachers’ learning ecologies. These interactions between meaningful learning moments are an essential element of Van Lier’s (2010) definition of learning ecologies. Figure 2 below provides an overview of such interrelated learning moments afforded by feedback types in the student teachers’ learning ecologies of this study:
Figure 2: Traces of Interrelated Learning Moments Afforded by Feedback Types in Learning Ecologies
This draws on the insights from the learner uptake analysis (Appendix B), the informants’ perceptions of their past and present essays and their resulting thoughts about future writings. Figure 2 thus illustrates possible interactions of learning moments afforded by some feedback types (e.g. focused vs. unfocused, direct vs. indirect or metalinguistic) in the past, present and future.
All perceptions were categorised as meaningful CF when student teachers qualified the feedback as essential to their learning (in green and violet). In contrast to meaningful contexts, the red fields indicate non-meaningful learning moments afforded by feedback that student teachers – according to the interviews – probably would not reactivate in the present and future. For example, Eva considered indirect CF as non-meaningful in WCF. She did not understand comments such as the -ing form of the verb become in the sentence Malachy’s storytelling inspired Frank to write stories himself, and to becoming an author’.
Concerning meaningful feedback, Figure 2 distinguishes between the subcategories meaningful pushed (in green) and meaningful agentic CF (in violet). Meaningful pushed CF presents interactions in only one or two temporal dimensions, whilst meaningful agentic CF regroups interactions in all three dimensions, i.e. past, present and future essays. For example in terms of meaningful pushed CF, student teachers mainly characterised metalinguistic CF (e.g. concord errors) as beneficial to their learning. Meaningful pushed CF made the feedback of Essay 1 more understandable and facilitated grammar checks before they submitted Essay 2 (Appendix B: learner uptake analysis). Moreover, student teachers commented positively on direct CF, which helped them write capital letters for nationalities, months or the personal pronoun I in Essay 2. The latter perceptions align with Yeh’s (2016) study, indicating a strong preference for direct CF.
However, perceptions of learning moments afforded by unfocused and focused CF in all three temporal dimensions were qualified as meaningful agentic CF (Figure 2: violet fields). In this case, student teachers added projective elements of the future to iterational elements in the past (e.g. awareness) and practical-evaluative elements in the present (e.g. concreteness). Thus, they elaborated agency (Emirbayer & Mische 1998). Two arguments can illustrate such meaningful agentic CF.
First, most informants (except Brad and Tom) deemed unfocused CF necessary because they thought it helped them focus on accuracy in Essay 2 and would help them in future writings. The argument here was that future teachers have to be able to write texts without any mistakes in real-world writing situations (product-oriented feedback). Notably, according to the data, student teachers did not perceive unfocused feedback as something harmful, especially not in dialogic oral writing conferences subsequent to WCF. They required even more such error treatment. In this sense, the findings of the present study corroborate Liu’s (2009) research suggesting that students expected more unfocused error treatment.
Second, the student teachers considered focused CF as equally meaningful agentic because they received a summary of grammar challenges in the end comments. One example here concerns Roger’s perceptions of a possible learner uptake in terms of incomplete sentences (Appendix B). He thought he had the opportunity to use such focused end comments as a "tool kit" to solve similar problems in the future (process-oriented feedback). This analysis of student teachers’ perceptions aligns with Carless, Salter, Yang & Lam’s interesting definition of the term sustainable feedback:
dialogic processes and activities which can support and inform the student on the current [emphasis added] task, whilst also developing the ability to self-regulate performance on future [emphasis added] tasks. (Carless, Salter, Yang & Lam 2011: 397)
6.2 Linguo-Didactic Issues of Meaningful or Non-Meaningful Feedback
In contrast to ecological perspectives focusing more clearly on interactions in a large setting, a linguo-didactic perspective analyses the findings more at the sublevel. Here, both WCF and OCF seemed to create many learning moments. With a respective average of X = 4.2 and X = 4.9, coding references, understandability (an aspect of preferred feedback) and concreteness (a factor affording learning moments) seemed to have the highest scores. Interestingly, the informants often mentioned metalinguistic feedback when reflecting on understandability and concreteness during the interviews. For example, Faith thought teachers should provide concrete feedback and write "capital letter" in the margin when they read i in a student teacher’s essay. Most student teachers preferred such metalinguistic feedback to indirect feedback, which they considered non-meaningful.
Other interesting aspects affording learning moments relate to the highly frequent use of “fine-tuned feedback” (Han 2001: 584) in the OCF. Two excerpts can illustrate such feedback. First, in Grace’s OCF, the teacher explained the problem of missing verbs in ’incomplete sentences’. In this context, the feedback mentioned some possible reasons for making this mistake by emphasising that incomplete sentences are frequently used in oral speech and that we often confuse oral English with written English.
Another good example of fine-tuning feedback was that the teacher explained Ruth that concord is a common problem for Norwegians because Norwegian is a low-inflectional language with respect to conjugation. In other words, Norwegian does not have many verb endings, and this makes it difficult to learn other foreign languages which have more verb endings, such as the third person -s in English. The iterativity of such feedback possibly increases student teachers’ language awareness during the writing process.
Furthermore, Ellis’s (2010) dichotomy between input-providing and output-pushing CF is of particular interest. WCF shares many aspects of input-providing feedback because the learners mainly receive corrections. Such an approach has been found to be meaningful in some studies (e.g. Hyland & Hyland 2006) in which students used feedback to improve their L2 grammar. However, OCF can be more output-pushing or elicitative when it directs students to reformulate and self-correct. Yoshida’s (2008) study suggests a preference for such feedback. Though very rare in the present study, it occurred in the case of Faith, for example. During conferencing, she guessed whom instead of who in her sentence He doesn’t really regret it because he needs it more than *who he stole from.
Accordingly, Swain’s (2000) output hypothesis was used to provide a more elaborate in-depth analysis of the general helpfulness and success of WCF combined with OCF. One reason for this success may lie in the fact that such subsequent writing conferences resemble metatalks with a high focus on the metacognitive function of output. In other words, subsequent oral feedback situations have an advantage because all three functions of output are present. For example, Grace pinpointed that she easily recognised the “incomplete sentences” (noticing function) with the marginal comments and the teacher helping her actively during the conference. Moreover, she could reformulate the sentence correctly (testing hypothesis) in front of her teacher, and she and her teacher talked a lot about incomplete sentences and missing verbs (metalinguistic phase) during the OCF.
In contrast to this, the feedback receiver in a written feedback situation only goes through a mental and individual noticing-the-gap process without any help from the teacher and does not necessarily have an opportunity to make hypotheses which oral conferencing can help to confirm.
7 Conclusion
The present study aimed to analyse grammar feedback perceptions from both ecological and linguo-didactic perspectives. It discussed illustrative examples of how student teachers perceived feedback types and modes in their writing development. Many student teachers reported on agentic moments in both WCF and OCF. For example, they finally understood how to identify an incomplete sentence. Such moments showed them how they could avoid such errors. Most importantly, all informants greatly appreciated the OCF because it constituted a cognitive "metatalk" (Swain 2000).
The findings of this study offer a number of pedagogical implications which may be of relevance to EFL grammar teaching.
First, it appears pertinent to emphasise the importance of using varied feedback types and modes which can create important learning moments in student teachers’ learning development.
Second, learning ecologies may include direct and unfocused feedback in higher education, in contrast to best-practice suggestions (e.g. Ferris 2014).
Third, the findings demonstrate the role of metalinguistic feedback, which often occurs as fine-tuning and is thus meaningful feedback. Such feedback is important because student teachers can bring the feedback they receive and the knowledge about grammar mistakes they develop during their teacher education into their own future teaching.
In sum, the success of formative grammar feedback depends on how student teachers use the feedback they are offered. In this sense, the focus of the present study on self-perceived aspects of feedback preferences and essential learning moments afforded by written and oral feedback may inspire student teachers and teacher educators who wish to develop their feedback practices. However, more longitudinal research is needed so as to further examine the problem of feedback use (e.g. Jonsson 2013). This is of particular importance for teacher education, which needs to focus more clearly on the link between feedback use and meaningful grammar feedback.
Appendices
Appendix A
Interview Guide
General Questions
● Preparation / time: How much time did it take to write the two essays? How difficult was it to write the essays?
● Language: Did you have any language-related challenges? Did you use a dictionary or other digital tools?
Specific Questions
Mapping CF in the Iterative Past (Essay 1):
Written Corrective Feedback
● Marginal comments
o Metalinguistic CF: What kind of metalinguistic CF was beneficial for you? Which CF was difficult / easy to understand? Did you like / dislike it? Why?
o Focused vs unfocused CF: Do you think that the teacher provided too many / not enough comments? Why or why not?
● In-text comments
o Direct CF: Was there enough direct CF or not? Why did you like / dislike direct CF?
o Indirect CF: Was there enough indirect CF or not? Why did you like / dislike indirect CF? How much effort did you put into finding the correct answers?
o Focused vs unfocused CF: Should the teacher have corrected even more or not? How important is it for you that all mistakes are corrected? Was the CF focused enough or not?
● End comments
o Evaluation of CF: What did you do with the end comments? What do you think of the end comments? How beneficial were these?
o Focused / intensive CF: Was the CF focused enough?
Oral Corrective Feedback
● Warm-up questions: How useful was the preparation time before the OCF? Did you take some notes during the conferencing? What did you do with the oral (and written) comments after the conference?
● Iterational element / iterative past / selective attention: Which concrete feedback was mentioned several times, both in WCF and OCF? Which oral comments do you remember and why? Which WCF did you understand better thanks to the OCF?
● Metalinguistic CF: Which metalinguistic terms were difficult to understand? Why or why not?
● Level of CF: Which CF was difficult or easy to understand? Which things were still unclear after the OCF?
● Ecological transitions: Which concrete and essential learning moments do you remember from the OCF? Do you remember any moments that were not beneficial to your learning?
Mapping the Practical-Evaluative Present (Essay 2)
● Warm-up questions: Did you go through your text before submitting your essay? How much time did you use for this grammar check-up?
● Uptake: As I can see here in this essay, you have improved / not improved the following three problems pinpointed in the end comments of the first essay:
1. …; 2. …; 3. ….
Why and how did you improve? Or why did you not improve?
● Practical evaluative / problematization: What are your main grammatical challenges? Why are these issues challenging?
● Agentic moment / ecological transitions: Are there any concrete grammatical explanations (from the teaching or the provided WCF or OCF) that you considered very useful and used while writing the essay? Are there any un-useful explanations? Please elaborate on these.
Mapping the Projective Future
● Warm-up questions: Do you think that you will like or dislike English grammar or grammar feedback in the future? Why or why not?
● Projective / narrative construction and hypothetical resolution: Which mistakes will you make less in the future? How do you want to improve your grammar? What do you want to improve?
Appendix B
Names
|
Code 1
Essay 1→Essay 2
|
Code 2
Essay 1→Essay 2
|
Code 3
Essay 1→Essay 2
|
Brad
|
Word classes
(+) 4→0
|
Incomplete sentences
(-) 1→2
|
Unclear sentences
(=) 1→1
|
Dennis
|
Tense shift problems
(-) 2→3
|
Unclear sentences
(-) 5→6
|
Concord errors
(+) 4→3
|
John
|
Run-on sentences
(-) 2→3
|
Unclear sentences
(-) 4→5
|
Concord errors
(-) 3→4
|
Roger
|
Run-on sentences
(+) 1→0
|
Incomplete sentences
(+) 2→0
|
Concord errors
(+) 3→0
|
Tom
|
Incomplete sentences
(+) 7→1
|
Unclear sentences
(+) 2→0
|
Word classes
(+) 2→0
|
Eva
|
Run-on sentences
(+) 5→1
|
Incomplete sentences
(+) 2→1
|
Word classes
(=) 1→1
|
Faith
|
Apostrophes
(-) 3→4
|
Incomplete sentences
(+) 4→0
|
Concord errors
(+) 6→0
|
Grace
|
Incomplete sentences
(+) 7→3
|
Unclear sentences
(+) 4→3
|
Run-on sentences
(+) 1→0
|
Pauline
|
Incomplete sentences
(+) 1→0
|
Unclear sentences
(+) 2→1
|
Concord errors
(+) 1→0
|
Ruth
|
Concord errors
(=) 5→5
|
Prepositions
(+) 4→0
|
Apostrophes
(+) 2→0
|
Learner Uptake Between Essay 1 and 2
(Notes: (-) Negative uptake; (=) No uptake; (+) Positive uptake)
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Author:
Michel Cabot
PhD Candidate
Department of Teacher Education and School Research
University of Oslo
Department of English
Western Norway University of Applied Sciences
Email: michel.cabot@hvl.no