Feedback strategies, Teacher Feedback, and General Peer Feedback in Saudi Academic Environment - Essay Example

Feedback strategies, Teacher Feedback, and General Peer Feedback in Saudi Academic Environment Name of university Due date of paper 1. Introduction The complexity of writing makes it the most challenging task for ESL learners who struggle with their linguistic problems and have to deal with it in addition to other requirements in the writing process (…………..). Improving ESL students’ writing accuracy is an essential factor in effective writing. The effectiveness of a piece of writing will determine in part its accuracy. This is the reason why grammar correction for second language students has received so much attention in the recent decades in the form of feedback which is defined by Garami (2010) as “any type of communication students receive in order to provide information about their written task”. Students can receive feedback from their teachers, as well as from their peers. Truscott’s (1996) claimed that providing feedback on L2 writing should be abandoned not only because it is ineffective but also because it is potentially harmful as it drives time and energy away from more productive aspects of a writing program. It has also led many researchers to examine its effects which in turn yielded in a growing body of literature indicate statistically its significant role in reducing the writing error by ESL students in particular, (Ferris, 1999; Frantzen, 1995; Chandler, 2003; Ferris and Roberts, 2001; Maleki and Eslami, 2013)peer. I also advocate providing feedback to ESL students because according to the cognitive load theory by (Sweller, 1988), there should be less load of working memory in order to optimize students’ learning potential that speeds up the long-term memory retention, therefore, feedback holds significant importance by drawing the learners’ attention to the areas that appear to be difficult for them to understand and conceptualize. However, it can be claimed that the nature of the given feedback on ESL writing in general and the attitude towards it in Saudi Arabia differs from other context due to the cultural differences. The influence of the culture on the learning process has been highlighted by Lantolf and Thorne who applied the socio-cultural theory by Vygotsky to SLA field explained that “Learning is embedded within social events and occurring as an individual interacts with people, objects, and events in the environment”. Therefore, a socio-cultural feedback is a language mediated interaction that enables teachers to create a context in which learners can participate actively in their own language and which the teacher can tine-tune the support that learners are given ( Anton, 1999). This paper will critically examine the strategies of feedback in teaching English writing in general to argue that teacher’s indirect feedback is more effective than the direct feedback and peer feedback should be employed in ESL writing classes as a complementary to teacher feedback but not alternative due to its role in enhancing the accuracy of the students’ writing by collaboration. Furthermore, the feedback in Saudi context will be tackled (discussed) based on the available literature where recommendation will be given to make the feedbacks easy, quick, and understandable for the students. 2. Two Types of Approaches Before discussion moves on to the feedback techniques, it seems necessary to explain briefly the two types of teaching writing approaches; product and process, owing to the strong relationship between them. 2.1 Product Approach It is the most traditional approach and mainly focuses on the teaching students’ linguistics knowledge; grammatical accuracy, vocabulary, punctuation, and spelling. With this approach, feedback from teachers or peers is not possible except on the final product; after the student shave completely finish their written task. 2.2 Process Approach This approach focuses mainly on teaching the linguistics skills and consists of different interrelated parts which are pre-writing, drafting and redrafting, editing and final version (Machdonogh and shaw, 2003). Students usually get multiple feedback opportunities from teachers, as well as through collaborating with peers during the drafting and revisions stages which certainly help to improve their final products. 3. Feedback on SL writing: In this section, the focus will be on the importance of teacher’s and peers’ feedback in teaching English as a second language. 3.1 Teachers’ Feedback: Providing written feedback to students is one of the ESL writing teachers’ most important tasks that offers the kind of individual attention that is otherwise rarely possible under normal classroom conditions. Since written accuracy in L2 is important to students in many contexts, they in fact according to Hedgcock and Lefkowitz (1994), and Lee (1997) want and expect feedback on their written errors from their teachers which could help them in improving their writings. The feedback on ESL students’ written errors continues to be a source of interest and debate among researchers, instructors, and students. type A range of studies have investigated whether certain type of written feedback or combinations of different types are more effective than others. These studies have most often categorize feedback as either direct (explicit) or indirect (implicit). The direct feedback could be defined as the providing of the correct linguistic form or structure by the teacher to the students above the linguistics errors, where the students need only to transcribe the correction into the final version when they revise the text (Ferris, 2003). On the other hand, the indirect feedback is that which indicates in some way that an error has been made without providing the correction, thus informing the writer that there is a problem but leaving it to the student to solve it (Ferris, 2003).The errors in the indirect feedback can be coded by the type or only underlined. In their study, Maleki and Eslami (2013) compared the impact of the two strategies of feedback namely the direct versus the indirect feedback on 90 intermediate Iranian EFL students. The results showed that indirect feedback group acted significantly better than the other group particularly in the delayed post- test suggesting “the lasting effectiveness of the indirect feedback over the direct feedback” (p.1255). Similarly, Lizotte’s (2001) also gave empirical evidence on the efficacy of the indirect feedback. In his study, he reported gains with ESL students of a low-intermediate English proficiency after using coded feedback followed by only underlined one, where their writing errors reduced significantly over one semester1. As indirect feedback can be given in many ways, (Ferris and Roberts, 2001) reported similarities in the writing accuracy between the participants who received coded feedback and only underlined feedback, though they showed preference for the former more than the latter. Therefore, I think indirect feedback has more potential to improve the writing of ESL students compared direct feedback and apparently using codes is more effective than underlining since they could facilitate the self-correction process by identifying the error type. On the contrary, those in favour of direct feedback say that direct feedback has a more positive influence on SL writing (Bitchener and Knoch 2010; Bitcherner et al. 2005; Bitchener and Knoch 2008; Sheen 2007). Most of these direct feedback supporters criticised the indirect strategy for being confusing since some students may not be familiar with the meaning of the codes used by the teachers to indicate the type of the errors. Nevertheless, I think this difficulty could be overcome by giving some mini-lessons or work shop at the beginning of the course to explain the meaning of these codes to the students, especially L2 beginners, and train them on the self-editing by using these codes. Chandler (2003) discredited the indirect feedback due to “the greater cognitive effort that students expended in making their own corrections is offset by the additional delay in knowing whether their own hypothesized correction was in fact accurate” (p. 25). Chandler (2003) compared the two feedback strategies, direct and indirect, on 15 ESL students in the intermediate level and found that direct feedback was better for producing accurate revisions, though there were no statistically significant differences between correction and underlining of errors. The superiority of the direct method in that study could be referred to the fact that it is easier for ESL students to transfer their teacher’s corrections in the following writing, than self-edit their errors after being underlined either with description or not. Nevertheless, the participants in that study felt that they were learning more when they were involved in self-correction and highlighted the teacher’s strategy of underlining with description as the best method of self correction (p. 291). In same vein, Ferris et. al. (2000) (in Ferris. 2002type2), who investigated the effect of these two feedback strategies on both text revisions and new pieces of writing, claimed that direct correction of error by the teacher lead to more correct revisions (88%) than indirect feedback (77%). However, the discussion of this study’s findings by Ferris revealed that students who received primarily indirect feedback reduced their error frequency rations substantially over the course of the semester more than students who received mostly direct feedback. Arguably, the several attempts by SL learners to find the correct form of the marked errors can assist (boost) their language acquisition despite the number of errors they may make during this stage. This position is supported by the “monitor” model proposed by Krashen(….) which states that, SL Acquisition, which is a subconscious process, is far more important than learning; which is conscious, since the competence developed through it and it is responsible for generating language. Adult learners can improve their low competence level by using the consciously learned knowledge in a definite way. In doing so, conscious linguistic knowledge plays the role of the monitor by altering the output in accordance with the time and conditions. Other studies which compared the direct and indirect feedback, namely (Robb et al., 1986; Semke, 1984), reported no differences between the two strategies. However, it could be argued that even though the accuracy of the students’ writing was almost similar in findings of these studies, The indirect feedback that ESL learners receive from their teachers may help enhancing their linguistic knowledge through the search that they have to do to find the corrections for their errors, where they are likely to review other forms besides the targeted ones. For example, when the student has to correct the tense for coded word (V T), he or she may needs to revise some different Verb Tenses in order to be able to decide the correct one. Another advantage was drawn by (Lalande, 1982, p.140) who demonstrated that indirect feedback requires learners to engage in “guided learning and problem solving” and, therefore, stimulates the type of reflection that is more likely to promote long-term acquisition2. But as SLA researchers of oral L2 production have found, learners should first “notice” (Schmidt, 1990) that an error has been made. Once the error has been noticed, the indirect feedback has the ability to force learners to engage in hypothesis testing--a process, which Ferris (2002) has proposed that may induce deeper internal processing and assist the internalization of correct forms and structures. Furthermore, the Theory of Inventive Problem Solving (TRIZ) by Henry Altshuller proves that inventive thinking is an effective way to solve a variety of non-typical problems. The theory suggests that SL students can improve their language proficiency by solving linguistic issues indirectly. On the whole, indirect feedback by teachers seems to have a long-term positive influence on the writing accuracy of ESL learners which is the main goal to achieve in the second language acquisition unlike the short-term results which are gained from the direct feedback. Despite all promising potentials of the indirect feedback to improve the accuracy of ESL students’ writings, it should be borne in mind that teachers must first consider their students’ linguistic proficiency before adopting one of these strategies as students’ abilities to perceive their teachers comments (feedback) vary across levels as (Ellis, 2008, p.355) has stated “the effectiveness of direct and indirect feedback is likely to depend on the current state of the learners’ grammatical knowledge”. Thus, it might be wise to give the beginners in second language an easier way to correct their errors which is in this case the direct feedback as (Maleki and Eslami, 2013) also suggest. However, it might be wise to combine it with some indirect feedback to train them on the self-editing process. As these students proceed in levels, the proportion of the direct feedback decreases and they become more independent in correcting their writing errors. (Ferris and Hedgcock, 2013, p.206) added to this; “when giving feedback on students’ errors, teachers also need to take into account their students background, especially their previous English language instruction”. Moreover, since most of the studies that proved the effectiveness (favoured) of the indirect feedback over the direct one mainly focused on stylistic issues, they might suggest that the direct feedback could be more (valuable- fruitful) in assessing the content not the form. 3.2 Peer Feedback: The use of peer feedback in English writing classrooms has been widely supported by many researchers as the learning tool that holds a variety of benefits. The term peer feedback can be defined as the”use of learners as a sources of information and interactions for each other in such a way that students assume roles of responsibilities normally taken on by formally trained teacher in commenting on and critiquing each other’s drafts in written format in the process of writing” (Liu and Hansen, 2002, p.1) long44 Berg (1999), who examined the effectiveness of peer feedback in ESL classes in USA, confirmed its beneficial effect on the quality of writing and argued its role in encouraging the critical reasoning. He explained that, the student needs to consider his/her peer’s advice, question its validity, compare it to his/her own knowledge and ideas and after that make the decision about the change, unlike the teacher’s feedback where the advices are usually taken without questioning. Similarly,(using) highlighted the importance of the critical thinking in peer feedback, and saidthat “becoming a critical reader of others’ writing may make students more critical readers and revisers of their own writing” (Begg 1999, p. 24). The results from (اثنين2 Hyland 1998 – Goldstein 2006) confirm this assumption where ESL students admitted when they were interviewed by the researchers that they sometimes use teacher feedback in their writing revisions (redraft) without understanding its necessity, while Lee 2007 argued that, their copying for teacher feedback without thinking about the reason lead to make similar mistakes in their subsequent writing task. This view is further supported by Lantolf (2003) who writes that the successful internalisation which “refers to the process through which learners construct a mental representation of what was at one point physically presented….. in external form“ (p.351) is the key to effective language development. In his study on college- level students, Rollinson (1998) found that 80% of the peers’ comments were considered valid and only 7%were potentially damaging. Similar findings were reported by Caulk’s (1994) who also claimed that peer feedback could be more specific than teachers’ as 60% of the participants’ in his study gave suggestions that he himself had not made when looking at the papers. This higher density of feedback could be referred to the fact that students have much more time to spend on individual draft than the overworked teacher, which also make them quicker and create an immediate interaction between writer and reader. The essential role of peer feedback is further supported by the arguments from social constructivist’s views of learning (peer2…) which highlight the value of students-student collaboration. Such collaboration not only serves the knowledge building process but also the knowledge construction process. Peer 2 suggested that collaborative knowledge-transforming writing helps in improving the learning potential more than traditional knowledge-telling learning However, in many studies that compared peer feedback to teacher feedback such as (…… النت…), (Connor and Asenvage 1994/ Tsui and Ng 2000/ Yang, Badger, and Yu 2006), ESL students found favouring teacher feedback over peer feedback when revising their drafts (reluctant to apply all their peers feedback in their revisions). Paulus (1999) reported that the 12 undergraduate ESL learners in her composition class incorporated 87% of the total amount of teacher feedback, against 51% for peer feedback3. The attitude of the ESL students toward feedback was surveyed bypeer(Zhang 1995) who found that 94% of the students preferred teacher feedback to peer feedback. Nevertheless, this might be because of the force choice that he gave his students to choose between only teacher feedback or only peer feedback, since in a following study (Jacob et.al., ) found that ESL preferred peer feedback as one, but not theonly one, of the feedback type with almost similar percentage (93%)4. Other studies that documented students’ attitudes toward peer feedback provided a qualitative observation of what may cause such a negative attitude. For example, واحد(Change and warren 1997) noted that students doubted the language competence (expertise) of their peers as they are in the same level بالاضافه على الدرساه المحفوظه5, while المحفوظه4(C- Allaei and Connar 1990) highlighted the cultural factor influencewhere some students were unwilling to criticize others in order to maintain the group harmony and the state of cohesion ( C Carson and Nelson 1994—1998). OR the problematic power relations that students associated with assessing their peers. واحد مراجع اتاكدمنها / ( c) 4 Carson and Nelson 1994 . Based on the literature, ESL students can earn a lot of benefits from using peer feedback in their writing classes, such as, developing critical thinking and enhancing the collaboration between students that appear important in acquisition of knowledge. However, peer feedback should be complementary to teacher feedback which is highly appreciated by second language students and it is assumed that it is the teacher’s responsibility to alleviate some of the problems which are associated with it by providing more support and training to the students with regards to peer feedback process. This in turn will help to build a positive attitude in the students toward peer feedback and recognize its benefits in improving their writing accuracy in the SL. I also suggest to encourage the students to adopt (use) the indirect type of feedback when they assess / review their fellows writing not only because of it previously explained advantageous but also to achieve the consistency in the students receive from their peers and teachers. 4. Feedback for Students in Saudi Context The strategies of providing feedback for ESL students are effective as they focus on cultural and social aspects and used teaching approaches. In the following section, I will focus on analyzing the feedback types in the Saudi academic context where I first learned English as a second language. Even though English language is compulsory at school for the first seven years of schooling, it cannot be underestimated especially in high technology, medicine, and international and other fields. English does not occupy a very prominent position in Saudi cultural context. Moreover, teaching English writing in particular is largely ignored where it is mainly dominated by the product-approach and done by unqualified teachers. Writing topics are assigned by teachers for completion either in or out of class time with a module text to imitate. It is rarely (uncommon) for teachers to require more than one draft, or work on revision techniques and students’ writings are always marked and assessed before moving on to the next task which might be the reason behind the absence of peer feedback. Feedback is usually provided by teachers typically at the surface-level with focus on linguistic errors such as grammar and vocabulary owing to the students’ low language proficiency. In most Saudi state universities, all new students need to undergo a preparatory year where English is a major subject where staff is a professional one; it includes more than fifty per-cent native speakers of English. However, what is taking place in teaching writing during the preparatory year is the continuation with a little modification of what is already applied in schools. In more details, writing seems to be a matter of memorizing pre-assigned topics where students sometimes receive the feedback from their teachers with their final grades. However, there are just a few studies related to the feedback on ESL/EFL writing in Saudi context and most of them are theoretical, thus, hide the practicality or a clear picture of this linguistic group. Similar to their counterparts in other studies (……….),(garami2) argued that Saudi ESL university level in Saudi Arabia “ do want, expect and appreciate teachers written feedback about their surface-level errors” (p.5) (saudi) conducted a qualitative study where he interviewed some ESL Saudi students to capture their opinions about the feedback they receive. The findings showed that, the majority of the students believe that the nature of the feedback practiced by their teachers hinder the efficacy of it. In particular, the responses revealed students’ discontent about indirect feedback which they described as (cryptic) and illegible while they preferred direct feedback for being more understandable. In a study which was conducted on 200 EFL Saudi students at the preparatory year and 20 English language teachers who are teaching at the same program in Saudi Arabic, (saudi classroom) investigated the preferences and attitudes of the participants toward written error corrections by using questionnaire. The results for the preferred time to provide feedback showed that student did not like to receive feedback at the drafting and revising stages while almost 70% of the teachers like to provide feedback during these stages. I think since the researcher did not conduct a writing experiment on these students, their negative attitude on receiving multiple feedback could be referred to lack of experience in writing many drafts and the ignorance of the benefits from doing that on improving their writing before the final assignmentas a result of the highly reliance on the product-approach. In line with this claim, (80%) of the students found preferring to get feedback at the evaluating stage since their main concern is the grades where receiving feedback could help them avoiding mistakes in the next assignments. Although both teachers and students in that study showed their preference for teacher feedback, the vast majority of the Saudi students were against peer feedback and believe that it is the teacher’s job to locate and correct errors which is consistent with the findings of (………………….) on Chinese context. This resistance for the peer feedback could be referred not only to the lack of confidence in their peers’ linguistic abilities as (……………..) claim but also to the cultural reasons as the learning environment in Saudi Arabic is teacher dominant where students are mostly passive and their role relays on receiving and seeking help from others rather than their teachers is not usual/normal.(saudi Hyland 2000) noted that “cultural factors made the participants feel uncomfortable with peers responses situation and discourage them from being critical of each other’s work” (p.52) Moreover, it could be the inner fear (concerns) that these students might have from being mocked by their peers or the possibility that their criticism might be taken personally and affect their relationship with their peers. These claims go in accordance with (…….) who argues that Asian student in his study reject peer feedback for similar cultural reasons. However, reasonable number of teachers in that study highly appreciated this technique as they assume that it leads to achievehigher accuracy in the final product. (Saudi classroom) also explored the participants’ preferences for the feedback strategies, where the findings revealed discrepancies between teachers and students. Coded feedback was the most favoured strategy by teachers who believed that students will become more aware of their mistakes if they corrected them by themselves depending on the given codes. Students on other hand disfavoured the indirect feedback, and claimed that codes are confusing and receiving the corrections form their teachers is more helpful. It can be argued that since the majority of Saudi students are taught writing by the product approach, the indirect feedback on their final drafts might be less effective as their self-correction will not be checked later by the teacher in another draft. Furthermore, from a personal experience, the lack of practice on using these codes could add extra pressure on the students and deprive them from gaining the potential benefits of this strategy, as when I took my first writing course in England, I encountered some difficulties understanding my teacher’s coded feedback and ended up leaving some of the errors without correction. The claim that using the product-method in teaching writing results in Saudi ESL is supported by the results of (Saudi long) study. He investigated the effects of introducing peer feedback to a group of university-level Saudi ESL students in a context where teacher-fronted classes are considered predominant. The results for the pre-experiment investigation/ questionnaire/ interview showed that students approved of teacher-written feedback but were apprehensive about peer feedback mainly because it was originated from fellow students whose linguistic level was lower than that of the teacher. However, the experimental group who was taught in process-approach and received both peer and teacher feedback showed improvement in their writing skills compared to the control group with only teacher feedback. More importantly, after the engagement in peer feedback, students became more positive about this technique and were hugely impressed by its potentials on their ESL writing routines. Similar results were reported by (alqurashi) who found that after introducing ESL Saudi students to writing as multi-step process for the first time where product was mainly used, most of them had positive attitude toward both giving and receiving comments and advices from their peer writers which helped them improving their writing. Nevertheless, it should be noted that enforcing draft revision and peer feedback in a context where product-based teaching method dominate might have a negative effect on the students who are assessed on their final product only. (saudi peer)found that despite the clear improvement in drafts of the Saudi ESL students, their performance fell significantly in the time limited exam situation where they were not allowed seek assistant from their peers. 5. Conclusion Among many factors that affect feedback, the high reliance on product-approach in teaching writing is probably the main reason affect learning through feedback. The preference for the teacher direct feedback over the indirect by Saudi ESL students might be referred to the unfamiliarity with the used codes besides that fact that the feedback is usually provided on final writing; assessed where student efforts in self-correction will not affect the given mark. Furthermore, despite the cultural influence on peer feedback, its absence in the ESL writing classes might be reason behind the negative attitude toward it since some students started to appreciate it after being engaged in the process approach which is highly liked to this strategy according to (long). Overall, in order to tackle the feedback problems in this context I recommend the following suggestions: 1- Current teaching methods should be updated in order for them to meet the trend of adopting the process approach in teaching composition. Moreover, the focus of this approach should not be on the final written product. Rather it should be on understanding the steps required to tackle a composing task. 2- Encourage revisions and redrafting among ESL students in order to receive more feedback which will help increasing their writing accuracy. 3- Apply the indirect strategy in teacher’s feedback after explaining the codes to the students since this strategy seems to have more long-term influence on their writings. 4- Encourage students to provide feedback on their peers’ works to arouse the critical thinking in them and enhance their writing skills which will in turn create a positive attitude toward this technique. It is also suggested to train the students to give indirect feedback to their peers and give them table with codes which will not only help them understanding these codes but also create a consistency between teacher’s and peers’ feedback. 5- Allocate some marks on the revisions and peer feedback especially at the beginning as a motivation for students to pay more efforts during this stage rather than focusing only on the final product until they start to appreciate it. Read More