Students' Response to Teachers' Feedback on Writing The Case of ...

introduced by Sommers (1982) who thinks that such comments constitute a challenge for
teachers of writing since they have <strong>to</strong> address a number of issues such as, motivating students
<strong>to</strong> revise and rewrite their work using the feedback, targeting areas of failure in students’
learning, and making students understand and incorporate teachers’ suggestions in their
writings:
The challenge we face as teachers is <strong>to</strong> develop comments
which will provide inherent reason for students <strong>to</strong> revise; it is a
sense of revision as discovery, as a process of beginning again,
as starting out new, that our students have not learned. We need
<strong>to</strong> show our students how <strong>to</strong> seek, in the possibility of revision,
the dissonances of discovery- <strong>to</strong> show them through our
comments why new choices would positively change their texts,
and thus, <strong>to</strong> show them the potential for development implicit in
their writing.(Sommers 1982:156)
Assuming that the aspects of language actually taught in classroom are the ones
teachers focus on when commenting on students’ writing, Hyland (2003:3-18) introduces a
list of the main foci of teacher written feedback. The six main foci of feedback adopted from
him are: focus on language structures, focus on text functions, focus on creative expression,
focus on writing process, focus on content, and focus on genre. However, Harmer (2004)
distinguishes only two foci which provide the basis for a distinction between two types of
written commentary: responding and correcting. Responding emphasizes the idea that the
main concern of feedback is not primarily the accuracy of students’ performance, but it is the
content and design of their writing. Correcting, by contrast, is limited <strong>to</strong> an indication of what
students fail <strong>to</strong> perform in different language aspects such as, grammar, syntax, concord, etc.
For correcting <strong>to</strong> be effective, Ferris (2003) argues that teachers need <strong>to</strong> consider three
fac<strong>to</strong>rs: first, students should be made aware of the significance of correction in the process of
writing; second, correction should be selective and focus on the most frequent errors rather
than single ones; and third, feedback should be provided on preliminary drafts than final
drafts. Hyland (2003) points out that for any feedback type <strong>to</strong> be effective, attention <strong>to</strong> what
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