Abstract
The issue regarding second language (L2) learners' responses to the teacher's written corrective feedback (WCF) has attracted interest from both L2 writing and second language acquisition researchers recently. Some researchers focused on English as a Second Language (ESL)/English as a Foreign Language (EFL) students' collaboration in pairs to cognitively process WCF together whereas other researchers probed individual EFL learners' engagement with the teacher's error feedback from a multi-dimensional—cognitive, affective, and behavioral—perspective. Absent in both lines of research, however, are studies on novice EFL pairs' collaborative engagement with error feedback. This gap serves as a starting point for the present study.Specifically, this study aimed to explore if and to what extent novice EFL learners could benefit cognitively, affectively, and behaviorally at the individual or pair level from collaborating with each other during the revision process in which they responded to the teacher's error feedback on their jointly composed drafts. This study adopted a case study research approach to collect data from multiple sources, including questionnaire responses, student texts, the teacher researcher's WCF, individual audio reports, recorded pair dialogues, and interview transcripts. Participants were six pairs of novice EFL university freshmen enrolled in the teacher-researcher's general academic English class in the fall semester of 2018. Data analysis focused on 1) identifying instances that demonstrated each student pair's individual or mutual engagement with WCF at cognitive (noticing, understanding, or resolving), affective (immediate reactions and overall attitudes), and behavioral (using WCF accurately or inaccurately; ignoring) levels, and 2) individual and contextual factors for each individual/pair's engagement with the teacher researcher's error feedback.
The major results of this study were threefold. First, collaborative engagement with the teacher researcher's WCF was found beneficial at the pair level considering each pair's mutual cognitive, affective, and behavioral engagement. In each pair, both students became cognitively more engaged (e.g., from ignoring level to noticing level), affectively had positive socio-emotional interactions, and behaviorally corrected together errors marked via direct feedback. Second, collaboratively responding to the teacher researcher's error feedback was found to benefit individual students in different dimensions. The less competent student in each pair became more engaged cognitively with the help from his/her more competent partner. The more competent student in each pair, in contrast, overcame initial negative emotions after interacting positively with his/her partner at socio-emotional levels. Finally, one possible factor identified to contribute to a pair's individual or mutual engagement with WCF was the teacher researcher's error feedback strategies/types and approaches. That is, students in each pair tended to react negatively at the individual level to a great amount of red ink on their joint text as they usually equated it with the number of errors. The teacher researcher's use of indirect feedback or indirect plus metalinguistic feedback to mark word-level or sentence-level grammatical errors could deter a pair from mutually understanding and/or resolving and accurately correcting the errors.
Based on the results, some pedagogical implications and limitations of this study are elucidated. For pedagogical implications, English writing or language teacher should adopt a selective WCF approach to address specific linguistic error types (e.g., fragments) on students' drafts. Regarding limitations, the teacher researcher's on-site presence seemed to lead to some students' short and reserved responses during data collection procedures.
| Date of Award | 2023 |
|---|---|
| Original language | English |
| Supervisor | Hui-Tzu Min (Supervisor) |