| dc.description.abstract | This study examines the TRAWL-UiA corpus documents and investigates how teachers differentiate their written feedback comments and to what extent they adapt their practices to learners’ different proficiencies. Discovering how the written feedback comments correspond to the recommended principles in LK20. It focuses on three aspects of feedback comments: mode/tone, explicitness, and use of L1 in written teacher comments.
The results showed that two out of four teachers used an overall positive approach with much praise, while the two others were neutral and more suggestive in their feedback comments. Surprisingly, the teachers did not differ much in the comment’s mode and tone between high and low-proficiency learners. With explicitness in the comments, the teachers differed in the amount used, mainly providing more explicit feedback to low-proficiency learners and more implicit feedback to high-proficiency learners. In addition, the analysis divided the teachers into using L1 and L2 to provide feedback, not differentiating on proficiency but on grade level.
As a concluding remark, teachers provide written feedback comments very differently from each other. They do not differ much in their overall commenting style between high- and low- proficiency learners, contradicting some of the principles in LK20. The results show that teacher identity is essential, and it is important to keep giving feedback comments with the individual learner in mind.
Keywords: written feedback comments, high-proficiency learners, low-proficiency learners, mode and tone, explicit and implicit feedback, and use of L1. | |
