The Effect of Written Feedback Types on Students’ Academic Texts

The aim of this pilot study is to examine how feedback type and error type influence the revision process of undergraduate writers. For the purpose of this study, text feedback was provided for eight essays, which were produced in a writing class for students who study English as a foreign language. Directive and non-directive feedback, differentiated by either providing or not providing students with suggestions for improvement, was distributed to approximately equal extents. The revised texts were then compared to the draft versions in order to analyse the students’ reactions to the feedback instances. Errors which triggered feedback were described in terms of the Scope – Substance taxonomy (Sigott, Cesnik, & Dobric 2016). In this study, the focus was on Error Substance, i.e. the units of text that need to be modified, namely, text, paragraph, sentence, or word. The quantitative analysis of the feedback instances (n=90) has shown that written text feedback is generally highly effective, and that non-directive feedback leads to a more positive effect than directive feedback, particularly as far as lowerlevel errors (sentence or word) are concerned. The reasons for non-responses to feedback cannot be attributed to feedback type or error substance, which shows a distinct need for further qualitative analysis.