Assessing Writing 19 (2014) 1–5

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Assessing Writing

Editorial

Feedback in writing: Issues and challenges

While feedback has a pivotal role to play in the writing classroom, much of the existing literature hashighlighted its limited impact on student learning. Whether it is teacher feedback, self-/peer feedbackor computer-mediated feedback, there is yet no conclusive evidence about its efficacy across differentcontexts. It is therefore not surprising that feedback has remained one of the most vibrant researchtopics in writing, which provides the impetus for this special issue on feedback in writing.

Although feedback is closely tied to the work of teachers, the majority of feedback studies havebeen conducted outside pedagogical contexts (Parr & Timperley, 2010), which are referred to as “non-contextual and nonsocial” (Goldstein, 2001, p.77). In recent years, researchers have called for a greateremphasis on context in feedback studies – i.e. research that focuses on “feedback within the whole con-text of learning and on the learner’s role in interpreting and using feedback” (Hyland, 2010, p.181). In asimilar vein, Parr and Timperley (2010) suggest that research should explore the “interactive and con-textual nature of response or work that considers response in relation to the writing outcomes” (p.69).Researchers’ cognizance of feedback as a social act and a real-world practice has resulted in an increas-ing interest in teachers’ feedback practices in the real classroom, as well as students’ perceptions ofand reactions to teachers’ feedback practices in specific classroom contexts.

Within the topic of teacher feedback, there has been a surge of interest in written corrective feed-back, which is attributed to Truscott’s (1996) controversial article about the harmfulness of errorcorrection in writing. As a response to Truscott’s work, a substantial amount of research over the lastdecade or so has focused specifically on the effectiveness of written corrective feedback (Bitchener,2008; Bitchener & Knoch, 2008; Ferris, 1999, 2002, 2003; Guenette, 2007; van Beuningen, De Jong, &Kuiken, 2008; van Beuningen, De Jong, & Kuiken, 2012). The bulk of such research has been conductedin laboratory-like conditions using the experimental/quasi-experimental design, with little pedagog-ical relevance and ecological validity (Storch, 2010). Hence, there is a great need for written correctivefeedback research to shift to naturalistic classroom contexts to explore the real needs of teachers andstudents.

Continuing interest in feedback research has focused on the learners, apart from the teachers,and their capacity to give feedback to themselves and peers. Such research has been informed bysociocultural concepts like the zone of proximal development (Liu & Hansen, 2002; Vygotsky, 1978;Zhu & Mitchell, 2012) and increasingly influenced by proliferating works in formative assessment andassessment for learning (Black & Wiliam, 1998; Gardner, 2006; Sadler, 1998, 2010), which posit thatthe learner has an important role to play in the feedback process. Research that explores students’role in evaluating their peers’ writing and in self-monitoring of their own learning is much needed toadd new knowledge to the current research base on feedback in writing.

1075-2935/$ – see front matter © 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.asw.2013.11.009

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As feedback is an area of work that affects all writing teachers and their students, it is importantthat the literature be augmented by research studies conducted in different parts of the world. Thelarge majority of published feedback research has been conducted in L1 and ESL college contexts, andin English-dominant countries particularly the USA. Empirical research carried out in other contexts,especially under-represented contexts such as elementary and EFL contexts will be a welcome additionto the field.

Methodologically, an increasing focus on naturalistic contexts in feedback research entails the useof a more qualitative approach to probe feedback issues in real classroom contexts. As such, it is naturalto expect more published studies that adopt a case study or ethnographical approach to investigatecurrent issues about feedback in writing.

Finally, the role of the computer in feedback has continued to draw the attention of researchersand teachers. As giving feedback can easily lead to teacher burnout, the use of the computer as a viablealternative to providing effective feedback has begun to attract the attention of writing researchers.A case in point is automated writing evaluation for the provision of formative feedback in classroomwriting assessment. Research on this area is developing and hopefully it will generate new insightsabout how AWE can assist teachers in giving feedback.

With this special issue of Assessing Writing, we hope to continue to explore some of the most salientand current issues in research on feedback in writing as delineated in the above. We begin with DanaFerris’s article “Responding to student writing: Teachers’ philosophies and practices”. Although exist-ing research on response to student writing has generated a plenitude of “best practices” principles toguide teachers’ practice, little is known about what teachers actually do when they respond to studentwriting, the extent to which they follow the recommended principles, and why they give feedbackin the way they do. This gap in the literature is addressed by Ferris, who begins by surveying thecurrent literature on response to student writing, providing a succinct summary of the “best prac-tices” recommendations from composition research. Using a mixed-methods approach that drawsupon questionnaires, interviews and selected student texts with teacher written commentary fromparticipants teaching both mainstream and ESL composition courses in Northern Carolina in the USA,the findings indicate that the participating teachers in general follow the recommended responseprinciples – e.g. utilizing multiple-drafting, peer feedback and one-on-one conferences, and givingboth commentary and written corrective feedback. In particular, the case study narratives shed lighton four general response types among the participants, namely the idealist, the pragmatist, the out-sider, and the dedicated veteran with different attitudes to feedback. Overall, the findings have yieldedencouraging findings about a strong convergence between teachers’ self-reported response principlesand their actual practices, despite some minor discrepancies. In her closing thoughts, Ferris rightlyreminds us that given the amount of time teachers invest in feedback and its potential in helpingstudents improve learning, it is an area of research that “requires and deserves renewed efforts andenergy from writing researchers” (p.18). It is therefore most apposite to begin the special issue withFerris’s article.

While Ferris concludes her article by suggesting that research on teacher response practicesbe supplemented by student surveys/interviews, Cristine McMartin-Miller continues this line ofresearch in her study “How much feedback is enough? Instructor practices and students’ attitudestowards error treatment in second language writing” by focusing on teachers’ error feedback prac-tices as well as students’ perceptions of their teachers’ practices. In current written correctivefeedback research, the general advice for writing instructors is to respond to written errors selec-tively rather than comprehensively (Bitchener & Ferris, 2012; Ellis, Sheen, Murakami, & Takashima,2008; Lee, 2011). However, little research has examined how teachers actually practice selec-tive or comprehensive error feedback in the classroom, and how students perceive their teachers’approach to error feedback. This research gap is addressed in McMartin-Miller’s study, whichadopts a qualitative research design that relies on interview data from three writing instructorsand their students in a first-year composition course for international students in a US univer-sity. The findings show that the three instructors approached error feedback in different ways,their practices changed over time, and they exercised their agency and adjusted their approachaccording to the needs of their instructional context and their own beliefs about effective learn-ing. Student perceptions, interestingly, did not always correspond to the teachers’ self-reported

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practices. The findings suggest that students in the study did not necessarily have a complete under-standing of their teachers’ error feedback practices; they might not understand the rationale oftheir teachers’ practice, pay insufficient attention to teacher feedback, or misunderstand their ownrole in the error feedback process. McMartin-Miller’s study has filled a significant gap in the cur-rent literature about the implementation of selective (versus comprehensive) error feedback in thewriting classroom, suggesting that the recommended principle of selective error feedback has tobe examined closely in teachers’ specific context of work and with reference to student percep-tions.

Taking teachers’ feedback practices as the point of departure, Nicki Litherland Baker examines thestrategies writing teachers adopt to cope with their heavy marking loads in his article “Get if off mystack: Teachers’ tools for grading papers”. Motivated by the concern that “best practices” principlesmay not take full cognizance of the realities of the classroom, Baker explores the problems writingteachers face when grading papers, as well as what they do to grapple with the challenges. Framed bysociocultural activity theory, Baker’s study adopts an ethnographical case study approach that includesthree university writing teachers at a Midwestern US university, drawing upon data sources thatinclude observations, interviews and artefacts provided by the participants (e.g. emails with students,screen shots). The findings, which are organized according to the major components of activity theory(i.e. actions and operations; tools; community and rules; and division of labour), reveal a range ofcoping strategies adopted by the teachers, such as imposing a time limit for grading, encouragingthemselves with intrinsic and extrinsic rewards, and turning to colleagues for advice. In conclusion,Baker recommends that responding communities be formed, where writing teachers gather togetherto share concerns and experiences and get support from their peers. Baker’s work shows that feedbackis a social act and that it has to be considered within the ecology of teachers’ work. As such socioculturalactivity theory has a great deal of potential as a theoretical lens and a methodology to help us betterunderstand teachers’ feedback practices.

While Baker’s work highlights the exhausting aspect of teachers’ work in giving feedback, in theirarticle “The pedagogical effectiveness of computer-generated feedback” Marie Stevenson and AekPhakiti attempt to find an alternative to liberating teachers from grading. Their review article examinesthe effectiveness of writing evaluation (AWE) in teachers’ formative evaluation of student writing. Atwo-pronged methodology is adopted, consisting of (1) a research survey that sheds light on the majorfeatures of current research in AWE; and (2) a critical literature review that identifies and interpretsoverall patterns of research findings and discusses gaps and weaknesses. The research survey revealsthat the large majority of studies, conducted in US college/university contexts, focus on written pro-duction involving ten different AWE programmes, the most popular being “Criterion”. In their criticalliterature review, Stevenson and Phakiti point out that amidst the small body of research on AWE,there is to date only modest evidence of the benefits of AWE in improving the quality of studentwriting. In closing, the authors call for greater attention to methodological issues in future research,such as the choice of participants (e.g. effectiveness of AWE for ESL and EFL learners), use of AWEprogrammes, and comparison of AWE feedback and teacher feedback.

The last two articles of the special issue shift our attention to the learners in the feedback process.Eleanor Hawe and Helen Dixon’s article “Building students’ evaluative and productive expertise in thewriting classroom”, informed by recent research in formative assessment and assessment for learning,is based on the premise that in giving feedback teachers have to share responsibility with learners andempower them in the process so that they develop evaluative and productive expertise in writing.Using an interpretive, qualitative methodology, the study explores teachers’ use of feedback duringthe teaching of writing. Data include classroom observation data collected from three elementaryteachers in New Zealand, as well as field notes, relevant documents (e.g. unit plans and materialsused in the lessons) and post-lesson interviews. It is noteworthy that Hawe and Dixon’s study is oneof the scant feedback studies that use observational data. While all the three teachers held beliefsconsistent with the “best practices” advice in the feedback literature, the observational data uncoverthe ways in which they enacted their espoused beliefs, specifically how they facilitated students’evaluate judgments and productive decisions with the teacher or with each other during the writinglesson. The study suggests that despite teachers’ espoused beliefs about “best practices” principlessuch as assessment for learning, these may be practiced in letter rather than in spirit (Hume & Coll,

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2009). Hawe and Dixon conclude that pivotal to students’ evaluative and productive expertise is theirunderstanding of the learning targets, and to achieve this informal opportunities for self-/and peerassessment, peer response and self-monitoring have to be embedded into the writing lessons.

Similar to Hawe and Dixon’s study, the last article of the special issue by Weiqiang Wang, “Stu-dents’ perceptions of rubric-referenced peer feedback on EFL writing”, focuses on the learners in thewriting classroom. Wang examines students’ perceptions of rubric-referenced peer feedback and theirperceived effectiveness of peer feedback for draft revision in an under-represented EFL context – auniversity in Mainland China. Like most of the other articles published in this special issue, Wang’swork is a response to feedback researchers’ call for more contextualized studies that capture feedbackdelivered in real, naturalistic contexts. Using a case study approach that draws on questionnaires,interviews and student essays, the findings show that students generally reported favourably on theuse of rubrics in peer feedback, though their perceived effectiveness of peer feedback appeared todecrease over time. Follow-up interviews disclose the factors that explained the students’ less enthu-siastic attitude to peer feedback towards the end of the study, which include their limited Englishproficiency, students’ knowledge of essay topics, and their concern with interpersonal relationships.Wang’s study suggests that students’ perceptions and attitudes regarding peer feedback can be influ-enced by a host of factors and have to be explored in their specific classroom context, thus pointingto the potential case study or ethnographical research has in advancing knowledge in peer feedbackresearch.

Although each of the six papers in the special issue addresses a specific area, they share a commonconcern about the importance of feedback to improve learning and teaching. They use a qualitative ormixed-methods approach, and their works are all based in the classroom. While this special issue isunable to capture all potential topics in feedback in writing, we hope that it will continue to stimulateinterest in this controversial yet vibrant research topic, raise new issues and concerns for furtherresearch, and help foster ongoing investigation of this important research topic. Future research couldaddress issues raised in the six articles, as well as many others, such as feedback in a wider range ofeducational contexts (e.g. elementary and secondary), feedback to younger learners and learners ofdifferent proficiency levels, teachers’ own research into their feedback practices, and teacher educationon feedback in the writing classroom.

References

Bitchener, J. (2008). Evidence in support of written corrective feedback. Journal of Second Language Writing, 17(2), 102–118.Bitchener, J., & Ferris, D. R. (2012). Written corrective feedback in second language acquisition and writing. New York: Routledge.Bitchener, J., & Knoch, U. (2008). The value of written corrective feedback for migrant and international students. Language

Teaching Research, 12(3), 409–431.Black, P., & Wiliam, D. (1998). Assessment and classroom learning. Assessment in Education, 5(1), 7–74.Ellis, R., Sheen, Y., Murakami, M., & Takashima, H. (2008). The effects of focused and unfocused written corrective feedback in

an English as a foreign language context. System, 36(3), 353–371.Ferris, D. R. (1999). The case for grammar correction in L2 writing classes: A response to Truscott (1996). Journal of Second

Language Writing, 8, 1–10.Ferris, D. R. (2002). Treatment of error in second language student writing. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.Ferris, D. R. (2003). Response to student writing: Implications for second language students. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum

Associates.Gardner, J. (2006). Assessment and learning. London: Sage.Goldstein, L. M. (2001). For Kyla: What does the research say about responding to ESL writers. In T. Silva, & P. Matsuda (Eds.),

On second language writing (pp. 73–90). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.Guenette, D. (2007). Is feedback pedagogically correct? Research design issues in studies of feedback on writing. Journal of

Second Language Writing, 16, 40–53.Hume, A., & Coll, R. K. (2009). Assessment of learning, for learning, and as learning: New Zealand case studies. Assessment

Education: Principles, Policy & Practice, 16(3), 269–290.Hyland, F. (2010). Future directions on feedback in second language writing: Overview and future research agenda. International

Journal of English Studies, 10(2), 171–182.Lee, I. (2011). Feedback revolution: What gets in the way? ELT Journal, 65(1), 1–12.Liu, J., & Hansen, J. G. (2002). Peer response in second language writing classrooms. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.Parr, J. M., & Timperley, H. S. (2010). Feedback to writing, assessment for teaching, and learning and student progress. Assessing

Writing, 15, 68–85.Sadler, D. R. (1998). Formative assessment: Revisiting the territory. Assessment in Education: Principles, Policy and Practice, 5(1),

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Sadler, D. R. (2010). Beyond feedback: Developing student capability in complex appraisal. Assessment and Evaluation in HigherEducation, 35, 535–550.

Storch, N. (2010). Critical feedback on written corrective feedback research. International Journal of English Studies, 10(2), 29–46.Truscott, J. (1996). The case against grammar correction in L2 writing classes. Language Learning, 46(2), 327–369.van Beuningen, C. G., De Jong, N. H., & Kuiken, F. (2008). The effect of direct and indirect corrective feedback on L2 learners’

written accuracy. International Journal of Applied Linguistics, 156, 279–296.van Beuningen, C. G., De Jong, N. H., & Kuiken, F. (2012). Evidence on the effectiveness of comprehensive error correction in

second language writing. Language Learning, 62(1), 1–41.Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind in society: The development of higher psychological processes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University

Press.Zhu, W., & Mitchell, D. (2012). Participation in peer response as activity: An examination of peer response stances from an

activity theory perspective. TESOL Quarterly, 46(2), 362–386.

Special Issue EditorIcy Lee ∗

Department of Curriculum and Instruction, Faculty of Education, The Chinese Universityof Hong Kong, Shatin, N.T., Hong Kong

∗ Tel.: +852 3943 6940.E-mail address: icylee@cuhk.edu.hk

Available online 15 December 2013