Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Contributors
- Series editors' preface
- Preface
- Chapter 1 Contexts and issues in feedback on L2 writing: An introduction
- I SITUATING FEEDBACK: SOCIOCULTURAL DIMENSIONS
- II SHAPING FEEDBACK: DELIVERY AND FOCUS DIMENSIONS
- III NEGOTIATING FEEDBACK: INTERPERSONAL AND INTERACTIONAL DIMENSIONS
- Chapter 10 Feedback and revision in second language writing: Contextual, teacher, and student variables
- Chapter 11 Interpersonal aspects of response: Constructing and interpreting teacher written feedback
- Chapter 12 Formative interaction in electronic written exchanges: Fostering feedback dialogue
- Chapter 13 Scaffolded feedback: Tutorial conversations with advanced L2 writers
- Chapter 14 “You cannot ignore”: L2 graduate students' response to discipline-based written feedback
- Author index
- Subject index
Chapter 11 - Interpersonal aspects of response: Constructing and interpreting teacher written feedback
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 October 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Contributors
- Series editors' preface
- Preface
- Chapter 1 Contexts and issues in feedback on L2 writing: An introduction
- I SITUATING FEEDBACK: SOCIOCULTURAL DIMENSIONS
- II SHAPING FEEDBACK: DELIVERY AND FOCUS DIMENSIONS
- III NEGOTIATING FEEDBACK: INTERPERSONAL AND INTERACTIONAL DIMENSIONS
- Chapter 10 Feedback and revision in second language writing: Contextual, teacher, and student variables
- Chapter 11 Interpersonal aspects of response: Constructing and interpreting teacher written feedback
- Chapter 12 Formative interaction in electronic written exchanges: Fostering feedback dialogue
- Chapter 13 Scaffolded feedback: Tutorial conversations with advanced L2 writers
- Chapter 14 “You cannot ignore”: L2 graduate students' response to discipline-based written feedback
- Author index
- Subject index
Summary
As a pedagogical genre, teacher written feedback is designed to carry a heavy informational load, offering commentary on the form and content of a text to encourage students to develop their writing and consolidate their learning. The information offers the assistance of an expert, guiding the learner through the “zone of proximal development” (Vygotsky, 1978) and providing opportunities for students to see how others respond to their work and to learn from these responses. Feedback plays a pedagogical role by pointing forward to other texts students will write, assisting students to work out the text's potential and to comprehend the writing context, and providing a sense of audience and an understanding of the expectations of the communities they are writing for. The substantial comments that many teachers write on student papers thus do more than simply justify a grade. They provide a reader reaction and offer targeted instruction.
Often, however, written feedback has been seen as purely informational, a means of channeling reactions and advice to facilitate improvements. Response is therefore discussed as if it were an objective, impersonal, and purely didactic discourse – simply an interaction between a teacher and a text. But, although the information in feedback is a key factor in learning to write, it is effective only if it engages with the writer and gives him or her a sense that it is a response to a person rather than to a script.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Feedback in Second Language WritingContexts and Issues, pp. 206 - 224Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2006
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