CORRECTIVE FEEDBACK IN L2 WRITING: A Study of Practices and Effectiveness in the Bahrain Context

Abstract

This study had the following aims: (1) to investigate the feedback and teaching practices of L2 writing at the University of Bahrain through classroom observations; (2) to investigate the effectiveness of two types of written corrective feedback (a. direct corrective feedback in the form of corrections of errors next to or above the original errors and b. indirect corrective feedback in the form of error underlining) through a 12 week quasi-experimental study that involved 46 Bahraini media students assigned to one of three groups (experimental group A receiving direct corrective feedback, experimental group B receiving error underlining and the control group C receiving no corrections but rather simple and summative comments on performance) and evaluated through pre-, post- and delayed post-tests; (3) to investigate teachers’ and students’ beliefs about feedback through interviews and questionnaires. The following are the most important findings. (1) Classroom observations showed that there were several problems in the teaching of L2 writing and feedback methods at the University of Bahrain. (2) The quasi-experimental study showed that even though the students improved in the course of the experiment, neither type of corrective feedback had a significant effect on their accuracy, grammatical complexity or lexical complexity in writing, and that there was no difference in the effectiveness between the first type of feedback compared to the second. (3) Interviews and questionnaires showed that the students preferred direct corrective to indirect corrective feedback (i.e. they preferred it when their errors were corrected by providing the corrections on their scripts to underlining) and that the teachers and the students valued feedback and believed it was beneficial. Interviews and questionnaires also showed that even though the teachers used a variety of feedback methods, they did not follow up students after the first draft was produced. In the light of the findings, some recommendations are made in the final chapter of the thesis.

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