Interpersonal aspect of written feedback: a community college students’ perspective

ABSTRACT

Despite the bulk of studies on written feedback (WF) in higher education in the past decades, the majority of them have focused on written corrective feedback. On the other hand, WF research on students’ perception of teacher WF is scant. Among those studies which focus on L2 students’ perception, the participants are mostly secondary school and university students. Different from existing feedback research which examined students’ perception of the focus, type, and specificity of WF, this article reports on a group of L2 community college students’ perception of interpersonal factors which potentially affect their response to teacher WF. Adopting a grounded theory methodology, thematic analysis of data collected from 93 open-ended questionnaires and two rounds of interviews indicated four prominent themes including two relational factors (students’ impression on teachers, student-teacher relationship) and two mediating factors (students’ trust in teachers’ professionalism, students’ responsibilities).

KEYWORDS:

• Feedback
• relationship
• interpersonal aspect
• community college
• second language writing

Disclosure statement

The findings reported in this article are a part of a larger scale feedback research project conducted by the author. This project, together with findings reported in this article, will be published in the form of a research monograph by Cambridge Scholars Publishing in 2019. Consent from Taylor & Francis will be sought to grant permission to re-print materials .

Notes

1. This year-long study, including the data reported in this article, will be published in the form of a research monograph by Cambridge Scholars Publishing in 2019.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sin Wang Chong

Sin Wang Chong is a lecturer at the Centre for Language in Education, The Education University of Hong Kong. His publications have appeared in some of the leading international refereed journals on assessment, including  Assessing Writing, Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, and Language Assessment Quarterly.