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Feedback on student writing : Chinese EFL university teachers’ cognition and practice
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Type
Thesis
Author
Yang, Jing
Supervisor
Hu, Guangwei
Abstract
Situated at the intersection of two research areas — teacher feedback and teacher cognition, this study investigated Chinese EFL writing teachers’ beliefs and practices regarding feedback. Four overarching research questions were formulated to guide the study. (1) How do teachers give feedback? (2) What do they know and believe about feedback? (3) What experiences shape their knowledge and beliefs? (4) What are the relationships between their beliefs and practices? The conceptual framework adopted to frame the study was built on S. Borg’s (2006) conceptualization of elements and processes of teacher cognition and Complex Systems Theory.
The study adopted a mixed-methods design. A case study in the first stage focused on 10 writing teachers at a major university in Northeast China. Data were collected over a 17-week semester through semi-structured interviews, marked student texts, think-aloud and stimulated recall sessions. On the basis of the findings of the case study, a questionnaire was designed, validated and used in a survey of 202 teachers across China in the second stage.
The case study found that the 10 teachers adopted divergent feedback practices. In terms of the priority of their feedback focus, they were classified as language quality control officers, peer review reviewers/arbiters, and lesson alignment markers. Underlying these practices were their divergent beliefs. For instance, some teachers believed that teachers were obliged to correct all errors for students and felt guilty if they did not do so, whereas others believed that students should also do their part. Some held a taken-for-granted assumption that students were incapable of doing peer review, whereas others revealed their experientially-based understanding that teachers’ sustained support and supervision helped students conduct peer review effectively. Three teachers’ experiences in participating in a school-based research project were found to have great impact on their beliefs and practices regarding writing instruction generally and feedback in particular.
The questionnaire survey helped to generalize important findings obtained in the case study. For instance, the pro-peer-feedback teachers in the case study, when their students corrected most surface errors in peer review, gave more feedback on global issues and targeted at certain error types in their own written feedback. The survey yielded significant correlations corroborating this finding: The more frequently teachers required multiple drafts and peer feedback, the more they attended to global issues and performed facilitative correction. Another finding concerns the influence of research experience. In line with the findings of the case study, the survey found that teachers who were engaged in research (e.g., participating in research projects) made frequent use of multiple drafts and peer review, while teachers who were merely exposed to research (e.g., attending conferences on feedback) did not do so.
Complex systems theory provides a new perspective on teacher beliefs with four dimensions: sensibility, strength (core or peripheral beliefs), scope (general or specific beliefs), and system (subsystems of compatible or contradictory beliefs). This theoretical lens also provides a new perspective on the relationship between teachers’ beliefs and practices. One important finding is that teachers’ beliefs about general issues (e.g., their roles and responsibilities in feedback) constituted core beliefs, while their beliefs about specific feedback strategies took a back seat, exerting less influence on their practices. The study challenges the assumptions that beliefs about specific feedback strategies must have (or should have) underlain a given action and that the belief-practice relationship is simply one of either matches or mismatches. These findings have important implications for writing teachers, school administrators, teacher educators, and teacher feedback researchers.
The study adopted a mixed-methods design. A case study in the first stage focused on 10 writing teachers at a major university in Northeast China. Data were collected over a 17-week semester through semi-structured interviews, marked student texts, think-aloud and stimulated recall sessions. On the basis of the findings of the case study, a questionnaire was designed, validated and used in a survey of 202 teachers across China in the second stage.
The case study found that the 10 teachers adopted divergent feedback practices. In terms of the priority of their feedback focus, they were classified as language quality control officers, peer review reviewers/arbiters, and lesson alignment markers. Underlying these practices were their divergent beliefs. For instance, some teachers believed that teachers were obliged to correct all errors for students and felt guilty if they did not do so, whereas others believed that students should also do their part. Some held a taken-for-granted assumption that students were incapable of doing peer review, whereas others revealed their experientially-based understanding that teachers’ sustained support and supervision helped students conduct peer review effectively. Three teachers’ experiences in participating in a school-based research project were found to have great impact on their beliefs and practices regarding writing instruction generally and feedback in particular.
The questionnaire survey helped to generalize important findings obtained in the case study. For instance, the pro-peer-feedback teachers in the case study, when their students corrected most surface errors in peer review, gave more feedback on global issues and targeted at certain error types in their own written feedback. The survey yielded significant correlations corroborating this finding: The more frequently teachers required multiple drafts and peer feedback, the more they attended to global issues and performed facilitative correction. Another finding concerns the influence of research experience. In line with the findings of the case study, the survey found that teachers who were engaged in research (e.g., participating in research projects) made frequent use of multiple drafts and peer review, while teachers who were merely exposed to research (e.g., attending conferences on feedback) did not do so.
Complex systems theory provides a new perspective on teacher beliefs with four dimensions: sensibility, strength (core or peripheral beliefs), scope (general or specific beliefs), and system (subsystems of compatible or contradictory beliefs). This theoretical lens also provides a new perspective on the relationship between teachers’ beliefs and practices. One important finding is that teachers’ beliefs about general issues (e.g., their roles and responsibilities in feedback) constituted core beliefs, while their beliefs about specific feedback strategies took a back seat, exerting less influence on their practices. The study challenges the assumptions that beliefs about specific feedback strategies must have (or should have) underlain a given action and that the belief-practice relationship is simply one of either matches or mismatches. These findings have important implications for writing teachers, school administrators, teacher educators, and teacher feedback researchers.
Date Issued
2017
Call Number
PE1128 Yan
Date Submitted
2017