Innovative Methods and Practices of Academic Writing and Writing Instruction
FEEDBACK ON FEEDBACK. IMPROVING POSTGRADUATE ACADEMIC WRITING ABILITY.
Jill Northcott¹, Pauline Gillies² and David Caulton³
¹ELTC, University of Edinburgh, UK. ²ELTC, University of Edinburgh, UK. ³ELTC, University of Edinburgh, UK.
This presentation will report research on an initiative to improve students’ abilities to write postgraduate assignments (essays and dissertations) by the provision of online academic writing courses run jointly by the English Language Teaching Centre and specific academic programme organisers for two different disciplinary groups. As feedback is considered to be central to student learning and academic achievement, providing effective online formative feedback to develop English academic writing skills for international students has become a crucial concern in the UK academic context. Whilst there is a general consensus that effective feedback is personalised, specific and timely ( Busse 2013, Hyland 2013), studies into student and teacher perceptions of feedback effectiveness have sometimes produced conflicting results because the experimental design removes feedback “from the contexts in which it has meaning for students” (Hyland 2013: 182). This teaching and learning environment is, potentially, a very meaningful context for research in this area.Using a grounded theory approach (Silverman 2011; Northcott and Brown 2006) we focused on written texts and feedback, combined with written student evaluation of the feedback they received (feedback on feedback), to identify characteristics of effective feedback. Initial analysis indicates that it is the combination of a personalised, confidence building approach to providing consistent and principled corrective feedback with a focus on developing awareness of academic conventions within disciplinespecific contexts which results in effective feedback
References
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Hyland, K. 2013. Student perceptions of hidden messages in teacher written feedback. Studies in Educational Evaluation 39, 180 187.
Northcott, J. and G. Brown. 2006. Legal translator training: Partnership between teachers of English for legal purposes and legal specialists. English for Specific Purposes 25, 358375.
th Silverman, D. 2011. 4 edn. Interpreting qualitative data . London: Sage.