A reader response style in feedback comments

A brief review of key findings in US composition theory is provided below based on its relevance to the issue of tutor writing style in feedback comments. A study of the role of feedback in developing student writing would be expected to address issues of ‘quality’ of feedback, and it is argued here that the way feedback comments are written remains an important factor in their usability.

Process approaches to writing in the 1970s and 1980s originating in the US emphasized the feed forward role of feedback in relation to multiple drafts and iterative writing. In the 1980s, much attention was given to the notion of teacher appropriation of students’ texts, on the basis that in following directive feedback closely, students would only reflect their teacher’s ideas and their writing skills

15 _{Hounsell (2003) usefully divided the literature into three broad groupings: studies relating to} students’ understanding of criteria and expectations and tutor expectations, students’ experiences and perceptions of feedback, and a smaller group of studies scrutinising tutors’ comments. Much of the research produced since that Hounsell article still seems to fall into these categories.

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would not be developed (Brannon, 1984, Hyland, 2000). Reid (1994) provided a cogent argument against a ‘hands off’ approach to feedback in the ESL classroom, on the basis that the appropriation arguments ignored situational contexts and undervalued the need to make meaning clear to an academic audience. Reid argued that it was teacher’s responsibility to share cultural and rhetorical knowledge with students, and she emphasised the idea of the teacher as cultural informant. In a later study, Hyland (2000) focused on issues of appropriation, tracking six students over a three-month period on a pre-university proficiency programme in New Zealand. Hyland concluded that one-to-one communication about feedback was essential if teacher and student intentions in writing and feedback were to be aligned and that formal peer responses to writing were less valuable than informal responses from close friends and spouses.

Directive feedback is often seen to impose tutor control on student work through evaluative comments, rather than the facilitative, advisory style of comment that encourages the student to make decisions about how to develop the text (see also Burke & Pieterick, 2010). Straub’s work (1997) is also relevant in developing

notions of appropriate use of directive and facilitative feedback .Straub carried out a study on the reactions to feedback comments by 172 freshmen students on a writing program at a large US state university. He used a 40 item questionnaire and

presented comments from tutors, over half of whom were experienced teachers and researchers, whose work, he claimed, “…was informed by current theory” (97). Straub found that students were equally interested in global and local comments, but preferred comments on organisation and development, particularly those that were specific and elaborate e.g. “your paper might be clearer if you state x..”. Students appreciated feedback on grammar and sentence structure and also liked comments on ideas, but not so much if they ran counter to their own ideas.

In terms of praise and criticism, Straub found that students did not respond well to more critical questions, and unsurprisingly preferred praise, but favoured outright praise less than praise delivered with reasons. Responses also indicated a dislike for highly directive comments, and particularly general comments that were terse and negative, e.g., “You've missed his point”, or “what evidence?” Instead, the findings also pointed to a preference for more qualified evaluative comments that

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offered some direction for improvement and asserted only moderate control over the writing. Students most preferred feedback that involved advice and explanations as such comments were framed as helpful and were specific in terms of suggestions for revision (p.112).

The Straub study, however, and to some extent the debate about appropriation has to be understood in terms of the context of US composition courses. On such writing programs, students typically write some kind of argument essays which draw upon personal opinions rather more than source texts which would be expected in an academic content course. In this situation, it may not be surprising that students reacted against what they saw as a teacher dismissing their ‘opinions’ for their own, as in the example below:

‘The paper isn't about the teacher’s opinion but of the students. We should work with the student’s opinion, after all it’s his paper.’

Student response to a comment on paper about legalising drugs (p, 104)

Straub (1997) refers to the conversational style of facilitative comments and how such a style encourages a dialogue. A key strength is the way it “plays back the writers words, engages with the way the reader understands the text, deals with specific points in the text and elaborates on them, presents critical comments in a wider context of guidance and crucially allows a less directive approach that does not “take control over the writing” (p.389). It is argued that this reader response strategy, focusing on the effect of the writing on the reader, helps to shift away from dependence on external tutor feedback in favour of developing self-assessment on the part of the writer (Burke & Pieterick, 2010; Juwah et al., 2004; Lunsford, 1997).

The effect of tutor style and presentation of comments in terms of how writers react to them is important here, but the context in which this type of feedback is produced is quite different from that of the taught Master’s situation, which is the subject of the present study. Straub’s approach relates principally to feedback comments on drafts, and seems to be based quite narrowly on literature and composition studies. It is also possible that the ‘conversational response’ might create a major barrier to understanding for international students who struggle with this type of colloquial and idiomatic language (Haggis, 2006). The extent to which

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tutors give feedback in such conversational tone and language would be worth investigating in an analysis of feedback comments, however, and the degree of facilitative versus directive comments in tutor feedback might also be worthy of analysis.

Given a range of tutor styles and preferences and the diverse contexts in which feedback is given, it could be argued that there can never be one right way of writing feedback comments, or one right style (Brown & Knight, 1994). However, there may be styles which are more effective and styles that are less effective and perhaps even styles that might be labelled as ‘unhelpful’. As Straub (1997) suggests:

We create our styles by the choices we make on the page, in the ways we present our comments. We have an opportunity to recreate, modify, or refine this style every time we write a new set of comments.... (p.248)

There seems no reason to treat Straub’s arguments as any less relevant twenty five years on. This conclusion points to the need for a method to analyse written feedback comments with the goal of identifying those styles that are more effective and those that are less effective. This point will be taken up in Chapter 3.