Exploring student engagement with written corrective feedback in first-year composition courses

This study provides insights into the nature of L2 writers' engagement with written corrective feedback (WCF) - how they process it and what they understand about the nature of the error - to explore its potential for language development. It also explores various factors, such as individual, socio-contextual, and pedagogical, which influence the extent of student engagement. Data include students' revisions recorded with screen-capture software and video-stimulated recall. The video-stimulated recall data were transcribed and coded for evidence of processing, error awareness, and error resolution. In addition, I conducted interviews with students and their instructors, and through a thematic analysis, I identified individual and socio-contextual factors that appeared to influence students' engagement.

The findings of the study indicate that the processing of WCF and error awareness may be affected by pedagogical factors, such as the type of feedback and its delivery method. In addition, I found that while socio-contextual factors, such as grading policy, may influence students' attitudes toward the importance of grammar accuracy in their writing or motivation to seek help with grammar outside of class, such factors do not appear to affect students' engagement with WCF at the time of revision.

Based on the insights gained from this study, I suggest that direct feedback may be more beneficial if it is provided in a comment or in the margin of the paper, and that both direct and indirect feedback may be more effective if a brief explanation about the nature of the error is included. In addition, students may need to be provided with guidelines on how to engage with their instructors' feedback. I conclude by suggesting that if WCF is provided, students should be held accountable for making revisions, and I recommend ways in which this can be done without penalizing students for not showing immediate improvements on subsequent writing projects.