Research Information System
7th International NALANS Conferencce, Trabzon, Turkey, 14 - 15 May 2018, pp.255-263
Writing instruction has always been a prime concern for English teaching in higher education especially in terms of giving guidance and support to learners. Although written feedback appears to have an assured status in ELT, still there is a pressing need to investigate students’ preferences to draw a clearer picture of what has been done and what could be done to improve the existing practice. Thus, this study aims at furthering the existing works by investigating students’ preferences for receiving teacher written feedback as an educational guidance practice to develop academic writing skills in a preparatory programme. A survey with 34 Likert-scale items was opted for to explore these attitudes and preferences. Besides, focus-group interviews were carried out to dig deep into the participants’ reasons underneath their preferences. It was found that the participants had positive attitudes towards making errors in their written works and tended to see them necessary to improve, yet they frequently reported their wish to get feedback from their teachers without any delay. They also wanted feedback on their spelling, language use, vocabulary choice, punctuation, organization, and ideas. Pedagogical implications and suggestions for future research are also offered in the current paper.