Jade Chung

Professor Ni
Writing 2
29 May 2022
WP 2 Final Draft
Moderator:
Today, we will be discussing the subject of the education of ESL students in schools and how to
best help our ESL students through a friendly roundtable discussion/debate. Here are our guest
speakers Professor Jean Chandler, Professor John Bitchener, Professor Rod Ellis, and Professor
Carol Severino.
So, our first question is about the effectiveness of feedback for ESL student writing. Is it
effective? Is there a certain method that is the best? Let’s first start with Professor Jean Chandler.

Chandler:
Yes, feedback is absolutely important to the improvement of English language learning for ESL
students. I have seen numerous studies that have concluded that corrective feedback is not
particularly effective, however, we should study these examples closely. My research concluded
that feedback is greatly effective in helping students, although my results displayed that the type
of feedback correction matters and affects the margin of improvement (Chandler 290).

Throughout my study, I tested whether feedback was useful, and I found that corrective feedback
positively affected the students in my study. The control group received no feedback, and as
expected, they did not improve, especially compared to the group that did receive feedback. In
terms of which feedback was best, my study showed that peer feedback was effective. Teachers
should give feedback and have students correct their errors; having students review their work
after receiving feedback would be useful because students are looking with a more critical eye at
their work and will be able to recognize these mistakes. Similarly, teachers should underline
mistakes for students to self-correct during their reflection; this method proved effective in my
study (Chandler, 2003).

Moderator:
Thank you, Professor. So, Professor Chandler’s preferred method of corrective feedback is
student self-correction and underlining. Next, we have Professor Rod Ellis.

Ellis:
Like Professor Chandler, I also believe that corrective feedback is positive for L2 students
learning English, in my case. In my research, students received different kinds of feedback and
the results varied depending on the type of feedback that they received, displaying that not all
feedback has the same effect on second language learners (Ellis 343).

In my study, I tested two types of corrective feedback, implicit and explicit feedback, in a
classroom-based study (rather than a laboratory-based one). The implicit feedback method used
was recasting, or the reformation of the student work excluding the error. The explicit feedback
used was metalinguistic explanation, or explaining the grammar rules and guiding students to the
correct answer. After numerous tasks and testing, I reached a conclusion that explicit feedback
was more effective than implicit feedback. On the post-test, students receiving explicit feedback
greatly improved and were more accurate than students receiving implicit feedback. The use of
metalinguistic explanation was the most effective based on my research (Ellis, 2006).

Moderator:
Thank you, Professor Ellis. Now, we have self-correction and metalinguistic explanation for our
list of preferred methods of corrective feedback. Our next speaker is Professor John Bitchener.

Bitchener:
Despite certain studies against corrective feedback in ESL classrooms, I believe that corrective
feedback is productive in the learning process for ESL students. In one of my past studies, I
found considerable evidence that insisted that corrective feedback is valuable to ESL learning.
Because my findings were in contrast to studies against corrective feedback, I proceeded to dig
further into the topic to attempt to understand how my predecessors reached that conclusion
(Bitchener, 2010).

In my research, I looked at direct feedback using the meta-linguistic explanation method, similar
to Professor Ellis. The control group in my study did not receive any corrective feedback, and I
had two groups receiving feedback. One group only received metalinguistic explanation and the
second group received metalinguistic explanation and an oral review alongside it. The second
group did the best in terms of the delayed post-test (after a ten week period) compared to the
group that only received meta -linguistic explanation. The combination of oral and written
feedback had the strongest effect on the ESL students in my research (Bitchener, 2005).

Moderator:
Thank you, Professor Bitchener. Lastly, we have Professor Carol Severino.

Severino:
As the other three professors have said, corrective feedback is most definitely helpful in the
learning process of ESL students. I worked closely with an ESL student from China along with
his teacher and tutor to understand his learning style. Through numerous assessments and
observations, I learned which form of corrective feedback was best for him, and I heard from the
student what he liked the best (Severino, 2011).

In my studies, I investigated the best kind of corrective feedback for ESL students along with the
mistakes that they make. I noticed that non-native English speakers were much more likely to
ask for help with grammar and punctuation. I concluded that the individual learning styles for
second language learners is heavily dependent on the culture that they come from and their first
language. Looking at results from numerous assessments, face-to-face and online feedback
resulted very similarly. However, when we asked our ESL student (test case), he commented that
online feedback was better for revisions and quick corrections, while in-person feedback was
better for discussions of words and how they were used. He also mentioned that learning
vocabulary was much more effective through reading rather than forcing it in a classroom
because it was much more practical to read these words in a book. Therefore, metalinguistic
feedback through either online or in-person forums will lead to improvement in ESL learning
(Severino, 2009).

Moderator:
Thank you, Professor. It seems that we have a consensus that corrective feedback is indeed
helpful for ESL students and that not all corrective feedback is the same. Different forms of
corrective feedback are more effective than others, and among our professors, it seems that
metalinguistic explanation is a popular method of corrective feedback for ESL students. Anyone
may now discuss with each other.

Bitchener:
I would like to go first then. Professor Chandler mentioned that he thought circling/underlining
errors was one of his preferred methods that he studied. Despite his conclusion, I found in my
study that circling errors is better than no feedback, so I can agree with that; however, it is not
the best form of corrective feedback. Self-correction is useful to encourage students to interact
with their writing and to find the mistakes themselves; however, if they do not identify these
mistakes, they will continue to make them. Hence, in my opinion, underlining mistakes should
be paired with metalinguistic explanation to ensure that students are fully aware of their mistakes
and are better prepared for those situations.

Ellis:
Yes, I highly agree with Professor Bitchener. I did find similar results that direct feedback in the
form of metalinguistic explanation was much more effective in helping ESL students improve
their English on the assessments that they completed for my research. It worked well for the
students, which can be seen in the results of the assessments, and the teachers also liked it
because it was not difficult to incorporate into their lessons (Ellis 366). I would love to hear more
about your study and how you reached these results.

Chandler:
Thank you for sharing your opinions with me. Despite my research, you achieved different
results which makes me want to review this topic more. The types of correction used in my
experiment were underlining, correction, underlining plus a description, and description. When a
teacher gave feedback then the student self-corrected, the student was more likely to learn and
not make the same mistakes on later assessments. Those that received only a description or even
a description with underlining did not do as well as those that received correction and
underlining along with self-correction.

Moderator:
In conclusion, numerous types of feedback are effective in helping ESL students improve their
English learning, which our speakers have kindly explained to us today. Various factors
influence the effectiveness of corrective feedback for second language learners, including their
first language, the kind of feedback given, the culture of the individual, etc. The best type of
corrective feedback is debated amongst professionals of writing studies, however, most
professionals believe that any corrective feedback is better than no corrective feedback at all.
Reflection
 While starting the second writing project, I was unsure of what I wanted to research and

learn more about. I tried searching for topic ideas through Google, and eventually, I decided that

I wanted to learn more about how ESL students learn and improve their English. The library

search and the database search were not difficult because I was able to generate a few good

keywords that gave me enough results that I was able to scroll through the results and choose

what sounded interesting to me. At first, I was deciding between researching bilingual students

or ESL students, and I ended up choosing to learn more about ESL students because it is difficult

to learn numerous languages, and I wanted to understand more about second language learners.

After my writing consultation with Professor Ni, I was able to solidify my research question for

this project. I then had to read the articles about corrective feedback and its effect on ESL

students; however, I had a hard time reading my articles because the articles contained a large

number of statistics and tables, and I had a difficult time focusing on reading the hard-to-read

journal articles. I read through the articles utilizing virtual highlighters and virtual sticky notes

that allowed me to summarize the main points of the articles and understand what the author did

in their study. Similarly, I utilized the method mentioned in Karen Rosenberg’s “Reading

Games: Strategies for Reading Scholarly Articles” by getting most of my information from the

abstract, the introduction, and the conclusion of the articles. I created a table in my document,

and I wrote down the most important ideas from the articles along with any extra information

that I thought would be helpful to me. I, then, wrote my summary, making connections between

the ideas brought up in the six different articles and setting up a basis for writing my

conversation.

I decided to format my conversation as a debate/roundtable discussion because I think it

was the easiest way for me to impart the information that I read in the journal articles. I wanted
to present the information as the authors’ thoughts directly (not through another character). The

purpose of this debate was to present the conversation and allow the authors to interact with each

other and share their research with each other directly. Some ideas were shared among all of the

authors, like the idea that corrective feedback is useful to ESL students, and some things were

different for each author, like the best way to give corrective feedback for ESL students. The

audience lies somewhere between the professionals and the general public because it is slightly

more formal than the general public level, but it is not so formal that only professionals in the

field would understand. The information is more of the conclusions and results from their

research, so a wider range of people would be able to understand the information presented in the

debate as long as they were interested in learning about the topic. The exigence of this debate is

to discuss the best ways to help ESL students improve their English writing skills. The authors

can present their ideas and help second language learners using the research that they did. I think

this is also a bigger topic because the United States receives a large amount of foreign students

who want to attend American universities since many are ranked among the top in the world.

The part of my conversation piece that I did best on was the summary of the six articles

and the communication between the different authors. Although I do not know what the authors

would actually say, I did my best to be creative and add some dialogue between the authors.

Something I had trouble with was creating a voice for the different authors. In my peer revision

comments, both peers mentioned that I should consider giving the characters more personality.

However, while attempting to fix this, I realized that I had no idea how to give the characters

more personality especially when I imagined the roundtable conversation to be more formal and

more about the information that they are trying to share.

 Works Cited

Bitchener, John, and Ute Knoch. “Raising the Linguistic Accuracy Level of Advanced L2

Writers with Written Corrective Feedback.” Journal of Second Language Writing, vol.

19, no. 4, Elsevier Inc, 2010, pp. 207–17, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jslw.2010.10.002.

Bitchener, John, et al. “The Effect of Different Types of Corrective Feedback on ESL

Student Writing.” Journal of Second Language Writing, vol. 14, no. 3, Elsevier Inc,

2005, pp. 191–205, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jslw.2005.08.001.

Chandler, Jean. “The Efficacy of Various Kinds of Error Feedback for Improvement in

the Accuracy and Fluency of L2 Student Writing.” Journal of Second Language Writing,

vol. 12, no. 3, Elsevier Inc, 2003, pp. 267–96, https://doi.org/10.1016/S1060-

3743(03)00038-9.

Ellis, Rod, et al. “Implicit and Explicit Corrective Feedback and the Acquisition of L2

Grammar.” Studies in Second Language Acquisition, vol. 28, no. 2, Cambridge

University Press, 2006, pp. 339–68, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0272263106060141.

Rosenberg, Karen. “Reading Games: Strategies for Reading Scholarly Articles.” Writing

Spaces: Readings on Writing, vol. 2, 2011.

Severino, Carol, and Elizabeth Deifell. “Empowering L2 Tutoring: A Case Study of a

Second Language Writers Vocabulary Learning.” The Writing Center Journal, vol. 31,

no. 1, International Writing Centers Association, 2011, pp. 25–54.

Severino, Carol, et al. “A Comparison of Online Feedback Requests by Non-Native

English-Speaking and Native English-Speaking Writers.” The Writing Center Journal,

vol. 29, no. 1, International Writing Centers Association, 2009, pp. 106–29.