What Feedback Works for You?

Professors and researchers exchange their ideas on the most effective form
of feedback on student writing.

Do you remember the last time you wrote a college essay, or any essay at all? The process of thinking,
writing, editing and revising can feel endless and tedious. It is equally important that the feedback you get on
your writing helps you improve not only your essay, but your overall writing process.

As a college student myself, I have experienced different forms of feedback on writing and know how
important it is. Most feedback on student writing can be divided into main categories-Direct and indirect
corrective feedback. Direct feedback is when a teacher clearly indicates all the errors or points of
improvement in a student’s work and provides the proper answer along with it. Indirect feedback on the
other hand is when a teacher marks the existence of the error without categorizing it or providing a
correction, transferring the process of correction to the student. There has been vast amounts of research and
deliberation on which of these two broad forms of feedback is most effective in helping students improve
their grammar and writing.

That is why, in this post we will take a deep dive into the feedback process from the perspectives of teachers
and researchers who share their insight on these two feedback practices to improve a student’s writing.
John Truscott

Have you ever lost your motivation to write after negative feedback on
an essay? Well, John Truscott- a professor of linguistics- argues that
teachers should completely avoid any form of error feedback, especially
any form of corrective feedback on grammar. He believes students would
take a negative attitude towards writing if they were continuously
corrected on their grammar, eventually developing a negative attitude
towards writing altogether. This in turn would drive students to
simplifying their writing and avoid grammar conventions that they are
getting wrong, resorting to shortening their writing and restricting their creativity in order to avoid
correction. Truscott’s most radical proposal is that teachers should simply avoid correcting errors in grammar
altogether and by “doing nothing teachers can avoid the harmful effects” of grammar correction altogether.
Interestingly, Truscott does not provide any alternative to grammar correction, leaving the task to “future
research…which could conceivably furnish the knowledge to provide truly beneficial feedback”. In light of
this, why don’t we look at what future researchers had to say about this.

Dana Ferris

Dana Ferris took strong opposition to the views of John Truscott. A professor of English herself, she has had
extensive experience teaching English to students. She believes that Truscott’s suggestion that error feedback
on grammar be completely abandoned is wrong and that “the absence of any feedback or strategy training
will ensure that many students never take seriously the need to improve their grammar and writing skills and
that they will not have the knowledge or strategies to edit even when they do perceive its importance”. While
she opposes most of Truscott’s views, she does agree that grammar correction can be tedious and
unmotivating for students, but rather than abandoning what she believes is an important aspect of improving
a student’s writing, she places emphasis on changing the way feedback on errors is presented to students.
She suggests that teachers give “less-explicit feedback” (indirect feedback) by locating errors without
labeling the type of error it is, which she believes would promote self-correction in students. She goes on to
say that teacher feedback should not only cover grammatical errors but also “students’ ideas and rhetorical
strategies”, indicating her support for a more holistic approach to teacher feedback.

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Ali Jamalinesari et al.

Ali Jamalinesari, along with Farahnaz Rahimi, Hsbib Gowhary and,

Akbar Azizifar are professors of linguistics and investigated the
effectiveness of indirect and direct corrective feedback on student
writing. They defined indirect feedback as “teachers locating
errors…and writing short comments” without providing the
correction itself, similar to that of the instructional feedback defined
by John Lalande. Their studies led them to the conclusion that
indirect corrective feedback is the more effective approach to
improving a student’s accuracy and composition in writing. In line
with Dana Ferris’ conclusion, they suggested that teachers shift from providing a large amount of corrections
to “discriminatory, attentive feedback on a restricted number of linguistic categories at a time”. Moreover,
teachers should “consider their students’ views about writing” in the form of peer feedback and self-
assessment.

Icy Lee

Icy Lee is a professor of English at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University and studied error correction from
a student’s point of view by giving students pre-corrected essays with 3 different kinds of corrective
feedback used, who were then asked to revise the essays based on the written feedback. She categorized
direct errors as “surface” and indirect errors as “meaning”, where surface errors were outright corrections on
grammar and meaning errors required students to detect themselves something wrong in the text and correct
it. She came to the conclusion that direct feedback in the form of surface errors were more easily corrected
by students but error correction in the form of meaning errors allowed students to critically think about the
writing and develop skills of self-correction by identification of their own errors. She also came to the
conclusion that Truscott is wrong about completely abandoning grammar correction; rather she agrees with
Dana Ferris in that teachers should reconsider the way in which they provide feedback by individually
tailoring their feedback to students to “equip students with a range of strategies to help them become more
independent editors and better writers”.

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John F. Lalande

In an effort to pinpoint the most effective method of feedback on grammar, Lalande conducted an
experiment in which students were asked to write multiple essays and record the frequency of errors based
on the type of feedback provided. He came to the conclusion that error correction does not affect a student’s
disposition toward writing and that teachers should adopt a strategy of “total correction of written errors”. He
suggests that, to improve the efficacy of student writing, teachers should give instructional feedback that
consists of “informing them of the location and nature of the mistake” so that they can “invoke problem-
solving strategies” to correct the mistakes themselves. While he doesn’t explicitly call this indirect feedback,
his definitions and conclusions on feedback are in line with both Lee’s and Eslami’s in that students should
be allowed to develop skills of self-correction to become better writers.

Elham Eslami

In order to investigate the differences between indirect and direct written corrective feedback, Elham Eslami
conducted a study in which she provided two groups of students with two different forms of corrective
feedback on a piece of writing and assessed the writing accuracy of the corrected writing for both groups.
The results of her study allowed her to conclude that Truscott’s views on abandoning grammar correction
because of its negative effects was not entirely true. Instead, her results were in harmony with Dana Ferris,
Icy lee and Lalande in that indirect written corrective leads to more accuracy in grammar and writing. She
goes on to say that “applying indirect methods of error correction will necessarily call for sufficient linguistic
knowledge possessed by students to self-correct errors”, agreeing with a similar argument made by Icy Lee
that direct feedback may prove to be more effective for students with poorer skills in grammar.

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Conclusion

As you can see, it is not only the process of writing that is important in the development of a writer’s skill
but the also the methods of feedback that provide the tools for revision and kindle critical thinking in the
writer. John Truscott’s radical approach to error correction acted as a catalyst for research into the efficacy of
corrective feedback on improving writing skill and grammatical accuracy.

Many of the scholars argued for the merits of indirect corrective feedback, namely its potency to drive
critical thinking skills in students. The scholars for the indirect corrective feedback method also agreed that
the most important aspect of error correction was allowing students to develop independence with regards to
the writing and editing process. Moreover, by placing emphasis on self-correction, the indirect feedback
method allowed students to develop long term accuracy in their grammar and writing.

Those who found merit in the direct corrective feedback method argued that it allowed to students to build
on their knowledge of grammar conventions and linguistic features. It also allowed students with poorer
skills in writing and grammar to identify their errors more easily and build a systematic way of correcting
their work that would reduce confusion.

As a college students and writer, I have personally been subject to a greater share of direct correct feedback.
I believe that it is definitely a very useful feedback method when it comes to completing a writing project as
it tells you what to do in a straightforward way. However, as I have gradually been exposed to a greater share
of indirect feedback on essays, I have realized that it undeniably allows you to explore your own writing by
providing the means for self-correction. It allows me to question my own writing and engage in the revision
process by concocting new drafts of my writing.

What about you? Have you experienced either one or both kinds of feedback on your writing and which one
do you think has had a greater impact on your development as a writer? And if you’re a teacher reading this
blog, what have been the most successful feedback methods for you? Hopefully the insights and revelations
provided by experts in the field of writing have helped you tailor your method of feedback and inspired you
to cultivate a greater understanding of the importance of feedback.

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Works Cited

Truscott, John. “The Case against Grammar Correction in L2 Writing Classes.” Language Learning, vol. 46,
no. 2, 1996, pp. 327–369., https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-1770.1996.tb01238.x.

“The Case for Grammar Correction in L 2 Writing Classes: A Response to Truscott (1996 ) ’
DANAFERRIS.” (2003).

Ferris, Dana, and Barrie Roberts. “Error Feedback in L2 Writing Classes.” Journal of Second Language
Writing, vol. 10, no. 3, 2001, pp. 161–184., https://doi.org/10.1016/s1060-3743(01)00039-x.

Jamalinesari, Ali, et al. “The Effects of Teacher-Written Direct vs. Indirect Feedback on Students’
Writing.” Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences, vol. 192, 2015, pp. 116–123.,
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sbspro.2015.06.018.

Lee, Icy. “ESL Learners' Performance in Error Correction in Writing: Some Implications for
Teaching.” System, vol. 25, no. 4, 1997, pp. 465–477., https://doi.org/10.1016/s0346-251x(97)00045-
6.

Lalande, John F. “Reducing Composition Errors: An Experiment.” The Modern Language Journal, vol. 66,
no. 2, 1982, pp. 140–49. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/326382. Accessed 1 Dec. 2022.

Eslami, Elham. “The Effects of Direct and Indirect Corrective Feedback Techniques on EFL Students’
Writing.” Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences, vol. 98, 2014, pp. 445–452.,
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sbspro.2014.03.438.