The Academic Literacies Symposium was held at the Indiana University of Pennsylvania in February 2010. It provided an opportunity for both graduate students and faculty to share research and engage in conversations on interdisciplinary academic literacy pedagogies. This symposium hosted two distinguished scholars: Dr. Alan Hirvela from The Ohio State University and Dr. Suresh Canagarajah from Pennsylvania State University. It involved dissertation roundtables and concurrent presentation sessions, as well as poster presentations. At this event, I had the opportunity to present a study entitled “Going Beyond Grammar-Based Feedback in Writing Classrooms: A Small-Scale Study of Three EFL Teachers.”

The issue of grammar in teaching writing and in giving feedback to writing assignments has been disputed for the past few decades. According to Reid (2001), responding to students’ writing has become an essential and central part of teaching writing and has shifted from evaluating the finished product to evaluating different stages of the writing process, from product-based responses to progress-based intervention. This presentation focused on my exploration of EFL writing teachers’ feedback and responding-to-writing practices and philosophies, provided insights into how feedback is given differently by different teachers, and empirically investigated the role of grammar-based feedback in EFL writing teachers’ philosophies and practices.

Three EFL teachers, Brian, Natasha, and Baker (pseudonyms), were asked to provide one-page feedback philosophies. Table 1 gives a detailed description of the participants:

A week later, the participants were individually contacted to respond to five open-ended questions dealing with their philosophies. These questions were (1) What does feedback (effective and ineffective) mean to you in writing classes? (2) What issues in the writing assignment do you usually stress? (3) What is the role of grammar in responding to students’ writing? (4) What is the relationship between good writing and good grammar? (5) How would you grade a paper that is full of grammar, spelling, and punctuation errors? Ten days later, they were given a short writing assignment by an ESL student, and they were asked to respond to it and provide one paragraph of written feedback.

This limited-scale, qualitative study revealed the following six important issues pertaining to EFL teachers’ feedback theories and practices. The first five issues synthesize participants’ perspectives. The last one includes my own evaluation of participants’ responses and feedback practices. Please be advised that all of the feedback attributes used (e.g., descriptive, improvement-friendly, relieving, vague, prescriptive, and so on) are my own and are based on the participants’ written as well as oral responses.

First, the three participants believe that giving feedback is important and indispensable in developing students’ writing skills. The end (better writing skills) seems to be the same though the means is different (grammar for Brian, content for Natasha, and both content and form for Baker).

Second, there is an explicit as well as implicit reference to audience and its significance in feedback-giving practices. As the participants directly or indirectly say, this audience-awareness “stuff” is a reaction against their own EFL context norms and against the way they were taught and required to teach.

Third, there is consciousness on the part of the three participants of new trends (process writing, social process, collaborative learning approach, peer response, situated learning, and the like). Undoubtedly, this could be ascribed to the education they had (master’s in TESOL) and the graduate degrees they are currently pursuing (PhD in composition and TESOL).

Fourth, in their responses, the three participants point out that good writing leads to good grammar, but good grammar does not lead to good writing. It seems to me the idea that we become better writers by actually writing is Natasha’s main feedback focus but not Baker’s or Brian’s. There is this consensus among the participants’ responses that grammatical difficulty leads to reading difficulty. In other words, the three participants asserted that a paper full of grammar and formalist problems (mechanics) makes the process of responding “harder” and “more annoying,” as they put it.

Fifth, according to the three participants’ responses, it seems that the more feedback items there are on a student’s piece of writing, the less engaging and the less relieving feedback becomes from a student’s perspective. All the participants state clearly that choosing to mark every single error or writing problem creates stress for the students. This in turn makes feedback futile and unfulfilling as far as students and the writing process are concerned.

Sixth, participants provided varying and diverse feedback characteristics:

• Too much judgment and prescriptiveness. Participants give feedback in a judgmental and prescriptive manner: for example, revise, delete, right, not a good idea, wrong.
• Too much vagueness. Participants give vague feedback: for example, revise, something is missing, this needs a linking word, take this out)
• Few instances of descriptiveness and improvement stimulation: Participants give descriptive feedback, such as “Can you describe more about Niagara Falls? Like the surrounding, the environment, tourists.” Please see Table 2 below in relation to what I call imagined and dialogic feedback items.
• Too many grammar-based and formalist feedback items: definite and indefinite articles, comma, tense, passive voice, word choice, plural formation, subject-verb agreement.

In short, the results of this small-scale research study indicated that the EFL teachers had varying theories and practices for responding to writing, though the feedback priorities overlapped at times.

REFERENCE

Reid, J. (2001). Responding to ESL students’ texts: The myths of appropriation. In P.K.Matsuda & T. Silva (Eds.), Landmark Essays on ESL Writing. 209-224. Mahwah, NJ: Hermagoras Press.

Ibrahim Ashour holds a PhD in composition and TESOL and is currently an ESL and developmental writing instructor at the Harrisburg Area Community College. He administered the Arabic program and taught Arabic at Penn State Altoona and the Indiana University of Pennsylvania. He has extensive ESL, EFL, Arabic, writing center, and composition teaching experience. His primary research interests include teacher supervision, technology and literacy, bilingualism, and composition theories and models.