Providing feedback to students, whether in the form of written commentary, error correction, teacher-student conferencing, or peer discussion, has come to be recognized as one of the ESL writing teacher's most important tasks, offering the kind of individualized attention that is otherwise rarely possible under normal classroom conditions. Teachers are now very conscious of the potential feedback has for helping to create a supportive teaching environment, for conveying and modeling ideas about good writing, for developing the ways students talk about writing, and for mediating the relationship between students' wider cultural and social worlds and their growing familiarity with new literacy practices.

However, despite the major part feedback plays in modern writing classrooms and in the lives of all teachers and learners, book-length treatments of the topic are rare, and much of the research published in journals fails to find its way to teachers. This volume sets out to address these gaps by providing readers with a clear synthesis of theory and practice, highlighting what is conceptually and pedagogically significant and offering a clear picture of the key issues in feedback today. We attempt to bring together theoretical understandings and practical applications of feedback for teachers, researchers, and others working in the fields of second language teaching and literacy studies.

We do this by focusing such key issues through three broad lenses. The first situates feedback in the context of the wider institutional, social, political, and cultural factors which have been found to influence how feedback is received and given.