Student response to written teacher feedback in first-year composition: Defining what students find useful & whether they believe it improves their writing.

摘要

In this mixed-methods research study, the author investigated a group of first-year college students' responses to and uses of their teachers' written feedback on their draft writing in a First-Year Composition (FYC) course. The author also examined, through corpus analysis, these students' definitions of "useful written teacher feedback." Methods of data collection included surveying 37 students, interviews with three of those students, and review of the papers on which the interviewees received their teachers' feedback. Study results regarding students' experiences with, and responses to, written teacher feedback indicate that the students relied heavily on such evaluation to guide their revision processes because they believed that feedback improved their writing. Further, corpus analysis revealed that students defined "useful written teacher feedback" as that which engaged them in dialogue; was helpful/beneficial; necessary for improved writing skills; and explanatory/guiding. Study data from the three interviewees revealed four patterns regarding students' expectations of their writing teachers: (a) The novice writers expected their writing teachers to be expert-practitioners; (b) The students valued the final, graded product more than the revision process; (c) The students were unconcerned by appropriation of their writing; (d) The teachers' feedback did not have to be positive to be considered useful. The author discusses these patterns in conversation with extant scholarship, as well as further considerations of the study as a whole. This discussion is followed by suggestions that the dissertation findings hold both for the field of composition studies and her writing pedagogy. Finally, in conjunction with presenting the limitations of the study, the author provides areas of potential future research indicated by the study, as well as her concluding thoughts.