Feedback as Formative Assessment on EFL Students’ Writing

Providing feedback on students’ written tasks is a common aspect in today’s classrooms. Feedback affects students’ written language learning by either enhancing it or hindering it, depending on what, how and when it is given. The purpose of this degree project is to research how teachers perceive students’ writing process, how they give feedback on students’ written tasks in a primary EFL classroom, and the reasons behind their chosen strategies. Semi-structured interviews with two English teachers teaching years 4-6 were used as a method for this study. To support and analyse the data from the interviews, this project contains an overview of the fields of written language learning, formative assessment, effective formative feedback and writing as a process using literature and previous research. The literature and research show that teaching writing in a foreign language should focus on enhancing students’ interest in writing by supporting their curiosity and willingness to become writers. This can be done by focusing on content of a text instead of grammar or spelling, as this does not support young learners in their writing process. Teachers therefore need to provide feedback on aspects such as content, coherence and structure and give students information on how they can proceed in and improve a task. That is when the feedback will have the most positive effect on students’ learning. Further, the process-based approach of writing is argued to be beneficial for students’ learning as it encourages students to take an active part in their writing process. The major conclusions of this study are that the two teachers prefer to give informal and oral selective feedback on students’ writing tasks during the task. They give feedback once or twice on a task and often in the middle, to scaffold a progression. However, this is not in alignment with process-based writing. The study also shows that the two teachers are not aware of the theories underpinning writing as a process. Instead, they are well trained in ways of formative assessment and scaffolding language learning, but not the process-based approach of writing