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Cody Lyon

Page history last edited by Cody Lyon 9 years, 10 months ago

Morra, A. M., & Asís, M. I. (2009). The Effect of Audio and Written Teacher Responses on EFL Student Revision. Journal of College Reading & Learning,39(2).

 

Summary

This study was conducted at a university in Argentina and was born out of a general concern for students' low performance on the writing portion of university exams. A preliminary evaluation of teachers' feedback practices in their courses revealed that written annotations on the margins of students' papers was the predominate method of feedback being used. The researchers in this study wanted to evaluate the effectiveness of written feedback, audio feedback, and no feedback at all. Analysis of their results showed that most (5/6) of the test groups had showed a statistically significant positive change in their writing errors after the introduction of feedback. Even the group that did not receive feedback--they were only told that they should work on revising their papers--had a positive change in the amount or errors in their writing. Regarding students' preferences for feedback, almost all of the students who received audio feedback reported a preference for it (96%), and most (86%) of the students who received written feedback reported a preference; finally, only a small portion (14%) of the students who did not receive any feedback reported that they enjoyed that particular method. The article concluded with a suggestion that because both written and audio feedback showed a positive effect on students' revisions, perhaps writing teachers should offer their students an option to choose the kind of feedback they would like to receive during the course, which would allow for a student-centered approach to feedback choices.

 

Assessment

This was a great article for me to read because my current interest area is in student feedback methods, particularly the effectiveness of audio vs. written feedback. So I think this article will come in handy for me when I start researching for my dissertation this coming fall/winter. the only thing I thought was lacking (although I may have just missed something) was that the article didn't mention anything about the results of the feedback methods in comparison with each other. Sure, they mentioned that most of the groups had significant changes, but I was curious to read about about which method showed more positive changes, audio or written. 

 

Key Quotations

On a process oriented approach to writing instruction

"Process feedback, with its emphasis on the recursive nature of writing, has emerged as an essential component of the approach and has stayed 

in the forefront of instructional practice" (p. 69).

 

On the value of giving students the chance to revise

"Another important finding of the study is that the mere opportunity for students to revise their compositions on their own, without teacher 

feedback, resulted in a reduction of the number of flaws. This outcome emphasizes the importance of self-assessment, contributes to research 

that shows improvement of students’ end-products after rereading and rewriting their own papers without any feedback (Ferris and Roberts 

2001), and supports findings of limited teacher response to the progress students make in their writing (Graham, 1983, cited by Fathman & 

Whalley, 1990; Truscott, 2007)" (p. 76).

 

Krucli, T. E. (2004). Making assessment matter: Using the computer to create interactive feedback. English Journal, 47-52.

 

Summary

In this study, a high school English teacher used his dissatisfaction with traditional written feedback methods as the impetus to develop an interactive and multi-modal approach to feedback and student revising. Audio files, written feedback through track-changes, and hyperlinks to grammar instruction quizzes were among the primary methods used. In addition to these methods, a revision lab was used to give student in-class time to review the teacher's feedback and devote time to revising. Student responses to this interactive feedback/revision approach were very positive. The author plans to conduct future research to evaluate the effectiveness of his current model versus traditional written feedback methods.

 

Assessment

This was a great article to read following the Morra and Asís article from above because Krucli really fused the traditional and progressive approaches to feedback and revision. His article was very short but extremely relevant and informative; he included several tables that walked the reader through how he applied his various feedback methods. This is a great article to inspire writing teachers to take feedback options to a new level.

 

Key Quotations

On the author's motivation for his project

"As an English teacher, I hope to provide relevant feedback that will reach both the willing and the reluctant writers and engage them in the writing process" (p. 47).

 

On informal data of the effectiveness of his method

 "The class receiving the interactive feedback produced better-developed papers with significantly fewer errors than the class receiving traditional feedback" (p. 51).

 

 

 

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