A Research Report: Theorizing ESL Community College Students’ Perception of Written Feedback

ABSTRACT

This short exchange paper reports on the major findings of a forthcoming research monograph, which is going to be published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing, entitled “Theorizing ESL community college students’ perception of written feedback.” This research project, which was conducted in an international community college in Hong Kong, attempts to theorize factors which potentially affect English-as-a-second-language (ESL) community college students’ perception and response to teacher written feedback (WF). Through the adoption of grounded theory as the methodology and the use of a data analysis software, NVivo, qualitative data were collected from 93 student open-ended questionnaires and two rounds of student interviews (approximately 100,000 words of transcribed data). The data anaylzed yielded a total of four conceptual categories: technical factors, social factors, emotional factors, and personal factors. Implications related to assessment feedback research in higher education will be discussed.

Notes

1. “Initial coding” refers to a quick, line-by-line coding of data, resulting in a large number of codes. “Focused coding” means the merging of codes which emerge from the first round of coding to form “conceptual categories.” Lastly, researcher performs “axial coding” to unravel the relationships between categories and identify sub-categories.

2. For a more detailed description of the data collection and analysis process, refer to Chong (2018b).