Acts of responding. Teachers’ written comments and students’ text revisions

ABSTRACT

This article addresses written feedback to students’ drafts and provides insight into teachers’ formative assessment practices. Data are taken from a large cross-disciplinary project on writing and assessment in Norway and comprises a sample of 7th graders’ writing processes from 11 schools. Teachers’ comments are categorised according to different acts of responding, drawing on theories of language acts. The study also focuses what teachers comment on, and selected examples from students’ revisions illustrate how teachers’ comments are handled. Findings show that a majority of the teacher comments are directive acts, pointing to specific textual aspects – and quite seldom in a dialogic way. The directives constitute a continuum illustrating different degrees of teacher control. Constatives are frequent, but do not necessarily contain facilitating explanations. The timing of the response stands out as a critical factor. The discussion underlines a need for writing instruction that invites students to revisions and involves teachers and students in active dialogues on text.

KEYWORDS:

• Writing education – primary school
• process writing
• text revision
• assessment for learning
• directives
• dialogic feedback

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to our colleagues in the research group, Synnøve Matre, Kjell Lars Berge, Lars S. Evensen, Gustaf Skar and Ragnar Thygesen, for their contributions to the NORM project. We also want to thank the Norwegian Research Council, NTNU and former South Trøndelag University College for funding the project.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. In the article, we use concepts as ‘feedback’ and ‘response’ as synonyms. We also use ‘comments’ when referring to written realisations of these.

2. Full project title: Developing national standards for the assessment of writing. A tool for teaching and learning (see Berge et al., 2017; Solheim & Matre, 2014).

3. See Evensen et al., 2016 and Appendix for further information.

4. The two-year programme Improved assessment practices (2007–2009) was followed by the Assessment for Learning programme (2010–2014).

5. Austin and Searle have a nuanced terminology, distinguishing between locutionary (focusing on the semantic content) and illocutionary (focusing on the potential of meaning and conventionalised intentions) acts. Our point of departure in the categorization is the locutionary act, but we comment on potential underlying meanings when relevant.

6. Writing processes are dynamic and recursive and not necessarily split into separate phases. The concept of text versions is especially difficult when both handwritten and computer-written texts are studied, as in the NORM project. Nonetheless, the term ‘draft’ is used in the project design, referring to an early version of a text.

7. Some teachers chose to give oral feedback in the processes, which implies that we do not have the same amount of data from all the project schools/classes.

8. All schools were thus equally represented in the sample. It does not, however, make it possible to compare schools.

9. See 5.3 for examples illustrating how such comments are followed up by the students.

10. Corrections are not included here.

11. Within the domain Content, the teachers assess whether the topic is dealt with in a relevant and elaborated way. The domain Language use focus on choice of words, sentence-structure and style. See Appendix.

12. Within the domain Text structure, the teachers assess the overall composition of the text and the coherence between the individual parts and within each part of the text.

13. At this point, we can see considerable differences between the project schools, depending on different cultures of writing and on the degree to which the intervention was implemented (cf. Berge et al., 2017).

14. Further analyses of the student revisions are necessary to elaborate this question. Such studies are in progress.

15. Further analyses of the student revisions are necessary to elaborate this question. Such studies are in progress.

16. The letter c is the code assigned to the school, the number 6 tells us that the student was in 6th grade when joining the NORM project, and 47 is the number assigned to this specific student.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Hildegunn Otnes

Hildegunn Otnes is Professor at Department of Teacher Education, Norwegian University of Technology and Science (NTNU), Trondheim, Norway. She has conducted research on listening skills, digital literacy, writing instruction, language didactics and the relation between grammar and writing competence.

Randi Solheim

Randi Solheim is Professor at Department of Teacher Education, Norwegian University of Technology and Science (NTNU), Trondheim, Norway. She has conducted research on early literacy, writing instruction, writing assessment and writing development, sociolingusitics and language didactics, teacher education and teachers’ professional development.