Learning to be expert writers: feedback in secondary English

ABSTRACT

Feedback is a cultural tool through which English teachers can facilitate secondary students’ evaluative expertise in their writing development. While there is increased concern to use feedback to enhance learning at all educational levels, there is currently little empirical knowledge of how secondary teachers of English design feedback for complex appraisal. Using data from two qualitative studies, this paper explores practices drawing on Anglophone cultures of secondary schooling for subject English. Observation, artefact and interview data are analysed using a socio-cultural theoretical lens. Cultural tools including student planners, peer feedback and discussion linked students’ self-regulated learning to community norms for evaluating written texts. Two distinctive feedback conditions for written texts in the school subject of English are identified: the disciplinary practices of evaluation of texts within community cultural values, and the role of cultural tools in co-regulation of learning in the classroom context.

KEYWORDS:

• feedback
• co-regulation
• assessing writing
• cultural tools
• secondary English

Disclosure statement

There is no conflict of interest in these studies.

Notes

1. Students from Years 7–12, ages 12–17.

Additional information

Funding

The first study was completed with assistance from the Australian Government Research Training Program Scholarship.The second study was funded by a Queensland Government Horizon Grant.

Notes on contributors

Mary Finch

Mary Finch is a Post-Doctoral Fellow at Queensland University of Technology. Her research interests include feedback and academic writing pedagogy.

Jill Willis

Jill Willis is an Associate Professor in the Centre for Inclusive Education at Queensland University of Technology, in Brisbane, Australia. She researches how assessment, learning spaces and leadership can enable learner agency and system change in educational contexts.