Critical Discourse Analysis of Student Responses to Teacher Feedback on Student Writing

This study explores the genre of ‘student response to teacher feedback’ and analyzes students’ responses through the framework of critical discourse analysis (CDA). Drawing on CDA as a theoretical framework, we examined the structural, interactional, and interdiscursive features of the students’ comments and investigated relations between the text, interaction, and context. The structural analysis indicates that the students’ comments demonstrate their emerging academic literacy skills. Our interactional analysis shows that most students took on an active role as a good student and a hard-working writer, but some students exerted their agency by taking an opportunity to resist the authority of the teacher while others rejected it altogether. Our interdiscursive analysis illustrates that students used not only language from the teacher’s comments, but also metalanguage of the composition classroom to formulate their responses. Based on our findings, we discuss implications for teaching practices and future research on students’ responses to teacher feedback