Efficacy and effects of various types of teacher feedback on student writing in Japanese

Teacher feedback on student writing has received considerable attention in the research of second language writing (Ferris, 2004; Silva & Matsuda, 2001). One of the frequently examined issues is the efficacy of feedback that has been actively discussed to date (Chandler, 2004; Ellis, 1998; Ferris, 1999; Truscott, 1996, 1999, 2004). The other concern is the effects of various types of feedback on accuracy of student writing (Silva & Brice, 2004). Despite the fact that a number of studies have been conducted on these issues in Indo-European languages, no clear conclusion has been drawn (Ferris, 2004). Several studies investigated these issues in the JSL environment (e.g., Ishibashi, 2000; Sakai, 1999). However, the effects of feedback on accuracy of writing by novice and intermediate level JFL students have not been addressed. Considering the complicated writing system in Japanese, teacher feedback may have different impacts on JFL student writing comparing to Indo-European languages, which calls for further research to address this issue. The present study investigates the efficacy and effects of various types of teacher feedback on writing by American university students enrolled in a third-semester Japanese course. Four types of feedback, (1) providing indications and corrections of errors, (2) indicating errors and giving codes of errors, (3) giving lists of revising criteria, and (4) no feedback (the control group), were randomly assigned to the subjects. Initially, 124 participants were asked to complete five composition tasks in l5 weeks. For each task, they were required to revise their composition to improve the accuracy of their writing with the help of given feedback. Additionally, in order to investigate students\u27 and teachers\u27 views concerning feedback on writing, two types of survey were administered. The present study found that direct feedback is the most effective to improve student writing accuracy in a short-term period and that there is no significant difference in writing accuracy among the four groups in a long-term period. The researcher also found that the absence of teacher feedback negatively influence students to write and revise a composition. Based on theses findings, pedagogical implications to improve teacher feedback practices were addressed