Investigating ESL/EFL students’ approaches in response to feedback: A case study

Available online at www.jlls.org JOURNAL OF LANGUAGE AND LINGUISTIC STUDIES ISSN: 1305-578X Journal of Language and Linguistic Studies, 13(2), 153-181; 2017 Investigating ESL/EFL students‘ approaches in response to revision processes: A case study Amerah Abdullah Alsharif a a b , Hesham Suleiman Alyousef b* RMIT University, 124 La Trobe St, Melbourne VIC 3000, Australia King Saud University, PO Box 50574, Riyadh 11533, Saudi Arabia APA Citation: Alsharif, A.A., & Alyousef, H.S. (2017). Investigating ESL/EFL students‘ approaches in response to revision processes: A case study. Journal of Language and Linguistic Studies, 13(2), 153-181. Submission Date: 13/2/2017 Acceptance Date: 24/8/2017 Abstract The issues surrounding giving feedback to second language (L2) learners have attracted the interests of a number of researchers to date. Most continue to wonder how to give L2 students effective feedback. Some studies found that ESL/EFL students focus mainly on surface-level issues, those that relate to grammatical and mechanical aspects of writing, when attending to teacher feedback. Others found that students attend to meaning-level feedback as well, which relates to meaning changes, such as sentence clarification or the request to add a topic sentence. This raises a question: why do some students focus on surface-level issues while others focus on meaning-level issues? This study aimed to identify and understand the revision approach of six highly motivated ESL/EFL learners, analyzing their texts and confirming the results from their own point of view. We employed three data sources: structured and retrospective interviews, the students‘ written texts, and the tutors‘ written feedback. The students‘ revised drafts were analyzed using Faighly and Witte‘s (1981) taxonomy of revisions, which helped to clarify the dominant features of the students‘ revisions. Even though the students were at the same proficiency level, half of them focused on broader meaning-level changes (labeled as global-oriented students) and the other half were inclined to focus on surface-level changes (labeled as local-oriented students). Determining whether learners are local or global in their orientation is important in increasing the impact of feedback in perfecting students‘ writing. Further investigation on this issue may significantly improve the way in which written feedback is provided and utilized. © 2017 JLLS and the Authors - Published by JLLS. Keywords: written corrective feedback; revision processes; ESL/EFL students approach to revision; meaninglevel and surface-level changes; taxonomy of revision processes 1. Introduction A number of researchers have been attracted by the study of feedback on second language (L2) learners‘ writing. Most continue to identify how to give L2 students effective feedback. When considering L2 writers' proficiency levels, scholars found that different language levels might require certain types (direct or indirect) of feedback. For example, advanced level students benefit more from * Corresponding author. Tel.: +966-553-000-412 E-mail address: 154 A.A.Alsharif , H.S. Alyousef / Journal of Language and Linguistic Studies, 13(2) (2017) 153-181 receiving indirect feedback (Bitchener & Knoch, 2009), and there is a general consensus that lower English-level students might respond with greater efficacy to direct feedback (Chandler, 2003; Ferris & Roberts, 2001; Kirschner, Sweller, & Clark, 2006). Applications beyond teaching practices, however, have so far been minimal. Two key issues have been obscured in most research: a) the extent to which students respond to feedback, which depends mostly on high motivation to improve their writing; b) examining these responses from the students‘ point of view. Students who are keen to improve their writing in response to revision processes have been surprisingly neglected in research to date. Most studies often put teachers at ‗the center of the stage‘ (Lee, 2008), reporting their perceptions and focusing on the strategies they should use. Analyzing how students engage with feedback and allowing them to have input into the research has yielded interesting results (Ashwell, 2000; Müller et al., 2017). For example, Ashwell (2000), identifies some studies that found ESL/EFL students focus mainly on surface-level (or micro) features that relate to grammatical and mechanical aspects of writing; others found that students attend to meaning-level (or macro) features that relate to the development of ideas and the organization of a written text. 1.1. Literature review In this section, we present an overview of studies related L2tutors‘ use of written feedback, students‘ attitudes and preferences to feedback, and L2 writers‘ revisions of multiple drafts. 1.1.1. Feedback and its most useful form Feedback aids both students and tutors in making sound decisions about the next steps in instruction and learning. A number of scholars (Ashwell, 2000; Bitchener, 2008; Ellis, Sheen, Murakami, & Takashima, 2008; Ferris, 1999; Ferris & Roberts, 2001) found that L2 students‘ language improves when they are provided with written feedback. Ferris (1999), for example, argues that clear, prioritized and selective feedback could assist student writers. Similarly, Ellis et al. (2008) found that written correction was equally effective, and the participants outperformed a control group that did not receive correction on a delayed post-test. However, the question remains as to the form of feedback that is most efficient and well-received. Ellis (2009) reviewed the different options available for correcting linguistic errors in students‘ writing, which include direct, indirect, and metalinguistic feedback. Direct methods give explicit directions to learners while indirect methods indicate errors by underlining or using cursors to indicate omissions in the student‘s text, without correcting them. Metalinguistic feedback is similar to the indirect method, where codes are used to show the nature of the errors. The latter two kinds are often preferred as they employ ―guided learning and problem-solving‖ (Bitchener & Knoch, 2009). Investigators comparing the effectiveness of these methods had mixed findings, resulting in an ongoing debate about the relative merits of each (Chandler, 2003; Kirschner et al., 2006; Lalande, 1982; Storch & Wigglesworth, 2010). For example, indirect-coded feedback was found by Lalande (1982) to improve accuracy in grammatical aspects; on the other hand, Chandler (2003) observed that L2 students benefited more from direct feedback than underlined errors. There is, however, some scholarly agreement that students at different levels of language proficiency benefit from different types of feedback methods. For instance, Chandler (2003), Ferris and Roberts (2001) and Kirschner et al. (2006) proposed that direct feedback is more useful for beginners with low competency levels. The disadvantage with direct correction, howeve (...truncated)