Teachers'''' corrective feedback on the 11th form students'''' writing at Ngo Gia Tu high school, Bac Ninh

VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES FACULTY OF POST- GRADUATE STUDIES   THESIS SUMMARY Title: TEACHERS’ CORRECTIVE FEEDBACK ON THE 11th FORM STUDENTS’ WRITING AT NGO GIA TU HIGH SCHOOL, BAC NINH (Nghiên cứu thực trạng việc phản hồi chữa lỗi giáo viên viết cđa häc sinh líp 11 tr-êng THPT Ng« Gia Tù, B¾c Ninh) MA Minor Thesis Field : English Teaching Methodology Code : 601410 By : Trần Thị Hường Supervisor : Nguyễn Thuỵ Ph-ơng Lan, MA Hanoi, 2011 iii ABSTRACT Although teachers’ response to student writing plays an important role in teaching writing, it is usually neglected by teachers especially at high school level In an effort to investigate the reality of teachers’ corrective feedback on the 11th form student writing and students’ opinions on what they receive, the research was carried out with participation of 90 grade 11 students and 10 teachers at Ngo Gia Tu high school in Bac Ninh.This is a survey research with three main instruments The first one is the survey questionnaire for teachers and students which was employed to collect information about how teachers gave feedback on the student writing and students’ opinions on what they received The other two were the direct interview with two teachers and the document analysis of the teacher corrective feedback on students’ writing papers in practice This helped the researcher to get further information to justify the results of the survey questionnaire The findings of the study revealed that there existed a lot of problems concerning teachers’ responding methods, their feedback focus, their frequent types and forms as well as their help for students’ process of teachers’ feedback The results also showed the mismatch between what the teachers often give and what the students would like to get Furthermore, the study recommends several important directions with the hope to be able to improve the teacher’s feedback, to help the students process the feedback more effectively and thus to create a good cooperative working environment for teachers and students to teach and to learn writing more successfully iv TABLE OF CONTENTS DECLARATION I ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS II ABSTRACT III TABLE OF CONTENTS IV LIST OF TABLES AND CHARTS………………………………………………… VI PART ONE : INTRODUCTION………………………………………………………………1 I Rationale……………………………………………………………………………… II Aims of the study………………………………………………………………………2 III Research questions…………………………………………………………………….2 IV Method of the study………………………………………………………………… V Scope of the study…………………………………………………………………… VI Significance of the study VII Design of the study PART TWO : DEVELOPMENT………………………………………………………4 CHAPTER I: LITERATURE REVIEW 1.1 Theoretical backgrounds to the teaching writing 1.1.1 Definitions of writing 1.1.2 Approaches to teaching writing 1.1.2.1 The text-based approach 1.1.2.2 The genre-based approach 1.1.2.3 The process approach 1.2 Theoretical backgrounds to teachers’ feedback 1.2.1 Definitions of feedback 1.2.2 The benefits of teachers’ feedback to writing 1.2.3 Approaches to feedback giving 1.2.3.1 Single-draft approach v 1.2.3.2 The multiple-draft approach 10 1.2.4 Types of teacher feedback 10 1.2.4.1 Formative feedback versus summative feedback .10 1.2.4.2 Negative feedback versus positive feedback……………………… 11 1.2.5 Focus of teacher feedback 11 1.2.6 Forms of teacher’s written feedback 12 1.2.7 Issues in the teachers' written feedback 13 1.2.7.1 Traditional “marking” 13 1.2.7.2 Appropriating students’ texts 13 1.2.7.3 Overlooking the students’ varying levels of writing ability 14 1.2.8 Principles of teachers’ written feedback 14 CHAPTER II: METHODOLOGY .16 2.1 The context of the study…………………………………………………………….16 2.2.The textbook 16 2.3.Participants 17 2.4 The instruments for data collection 18 2.5.Data collection procedures 19 2.6 Data analysis 20 2.6.1 Data analysis of questionnaire for teachers and direct interview…… 20 2.6.2 Document analysis of the teachers feedback……………………… 27 2.6.3 Data analysis of questionnaire for students………………………… 28 CHAPTER III: FINDINGS AND DISCUSSION .35 3.1 Findings 35 3.2 Discussion……………………………………………………………………… .36 PART THREE: CONCLUSION 39 I Conclusion 39 II Recommendations 39 III Suggestion for further study 41 REFERENCES 42 vi APPENDICES LIST OF TABLES AND CHARTS Table 2.1 Teachers’ purposes of giving feedback 21 Chart 2.1 Times of teacher feedback on each assignment .22 Table 2.2 Frequency of teacher feedback types…………………………………… .22 Table 2.3 Focus of teacher feedback…………………………………………………………23 Table 2.4 Forms of teacher feedback……………………………………………… .24 Chart 2.2 Teachers’ treatment with too many errors in the student writing…………………25 Chart 2.3 The importance of teacher feedback………………………………………………29 Chart 2.4 Students’ expectation for frequency of teacher feedback on each assignment……29 Chart 2.5 Students’ reading of teacher feedback…………………………………………….30 Table 2.5 Students’ expectation for teacher feedback types…………………………………30 Table 2.6 Students’ expectation for the focus of teacher feedback………………………… 31 Table 2.7 Usefulness of teacher feedback forms as perceived by students………………….32 Table 2.8 Students’ expectation for teachers’ treatment with too many errors on writing… 33 PART ONE : INTRODUCTION I Rationale Language educators have long used the concepts of four basic language skills: listening, speaking, reading and writing Among such four skills, writing is considered as a productive skill in the written mode Writing helps students learn It helps reinforce the grammatical structures, idioms and vocabulary that students have taught They also have a chance to be adventurous with the language, to go beyond what they have just learnt When writing, they necessarily become very involved in the new language, the effort to express ideas With all the importance mentioned above, developing second language (L2) writing proficiency is now central to the teaching of English as a foreign language (EFL) However, how to improve students’ writing seems to be very difficult In many cases, students would need intervention from their teachers in terms of not only writing instructions but also their comments on the strengths and weeknesses, which will make students know how to go about improving themselves and become effective writers As Kroll (2003, p 115) notes, “second language writers often benefit most and make the most progress when teachers contribute to this goal through a variety of intervention strategies available in classroom settings” Thus, teachers’ feedback can be considered as a pedagogical tool for the students’ writing improvement Good feedback gives students stimulation for revision and motivation to maintain their interest in writing The use of teacher feedback in writing classrooms has been generally supported as a potentially valuable aid for its social cognitive, affective and methodological benefits (Merlin, (1986), Radecki and Swales (1988), Hedge (2000), Ferris and Roberts (2001)) They all believe that teacher feedback is very important and has a great influence on the success of teaching and learning writing However, such information is not always clear out Many studies on this area so far have shown that there has been a lack of consensus over how teachers should respond to the students’ writing Although teachers’ feedback plays such an essential part in teaching writing, most teachers especially high school ones not pay much attention to this issue At Ngo Gia Tu high school, there have been few attempts to investigate feedback in general and teachers’ corrective feedback in particular to explore which aspects of writing theory work in practice and which aspects teachers may need to adapt or modify in order to better serve their learners’ needs The above reasons have urged the author, a teacher of English at Ngo Gia Tu high school, to carry out a study on teachers’ corrective feedback in an attempt to get truthful information on how teachers at this school give corrective feedback on students’ writing; their problems in responding to students’ writing as well as students’ attitudes towards this feedback It is hoped that the study will help to make recommendations for improving current teachers’ feedback, helping students to process the feedback they receive more effectively and thus to improve their writing skills II Aims of the study The study is aimed at : - Investigating teachers’ corrective feedback given to 11th form students’ writings: their responding method, the feedback focus, feedback types and forms, as well as their problems in responding to the students' writing - Investigating students’ attitudes towards their teachers’ feedback and their opinions of the feedback they receive - Proposing some recommendations for teachers to improve their feedback giving practice in order to help students write more effectively III Research Questions In order to achieve the above- mentioned purposes, the following research questions were formulated and needed to be answered : How the teachers give feedback on the students’ writings ? What are the students’ opinions on the feedback they receive ? IV Method of the study The study was carried out using survey research method Survey questionnaires for teachers and students were main instruments for data collection Besides, the interview with the teachers and document analysis of the teacher feedback on students’ writing papers were also used to gather further information so that the research result would be more reliable Data gathered was normally largely qualitative, but it might also be quantitative V Scope of the study Feedback in writing is a broad topic including peer feedback, self- editing, teachers’ corrective feedback…However, within the limitation of research time and the length of a minor thesis, the study just focuses on teachers’ corrective feedback on 11 th form students’ writings The subjects chosen for this study are 11th form students because they have been taught writing skills for one year at high school level and they are quite familiar with their teachers’ comment This will make the study more feasible Its results will be more applicable into the real classroom VI Significance of the study The present study was carried out with the hope that it would provide a general view of how teachers have actually give feedback to students’ writing and what are the students' attitudes towards the feedback they receive By collecting both teachers’ and students’ ideas about feedback giving practice, some suggestions for improving teachers' feedback may be stated so that students can utilize it more successfully in their revision VII Design of the study This study consists of three main parts: introduction, development and conclusion The introduction part briefly presents the rationale of the study, the aims, research questions, methods, scope, the significance and the design of the study The development part consists of three chapters Chapter one provides essential literature review relevant to the study including teaching writing in general and teacher feedback in particular Chapter two deals with the methodology underlying the research, which presents the context of the study, the textbook, the background information about the subjects of the study, the instruments and procedure for data collection as well as the detailed analysis of data collected Chapter three is devoted to presenting the findings of the study and the discussion about it The thesis ends with the conclusion part which gives a summary of the main issues that have been discussed, some recommendations and suggestions for further research as well PART TWO : DEVELOPMENT CHAPTER I: LITERATURE REVIEW To provide a theoretical background to the study, this chapter is devoted to the review of concepts that are the most relevant to the thesis’ topic It begins with some theoretical backgrounds to the teaching writing, which includes definitions of writing and approaches to teaching writing Next come some theoretical backgrounds to teachers’ feedback, which consists of definitions of feedback, purposes of giving feedback, approaches to giving feedback, forms, types and focus 1.1 Theoretical backgrounds to the teaching writing 1.1.1 Definitions of writing What writing is and how it is developed has been a subject of discussion and debate for centuries, which shows a lack of consensus as to what it is and reflects the complexity of the writing process Traditionally, researchers focused mainly on form and the final product, while current research in composition emphasizes the composing process and strategies that are utilized by writers to attain the final product In this part, the researcher quoted some definitions of writing of different authors (Byrne (1991, p.01); (Lannon, 1989, p 9); (Flower & Hayes, 1981); (Renandya & Richard, 2002, p.1); (Silva, 1990, p.15)) … 1.1.2 Approaches to teaching writing The teaching of writing which is a vast and complex subject has long been a central element in all-educational systems Also a number of conflicting views of the best ways to teach writing have been presented Raimes (1992) identifies three principle ways of approaching the task; namely; the text-based approach, the genre based-approach and the process approach 1.2 Theoretical backgrounds to teachers’ feedback 1.2.1 Definitions of feedback Up to the present, responding to the student writing, including giving feedback is one of the most controversial topics in second language instruction and theory There have been few attempts to define the term “feedback” in teaching writing, researchers seem to have reached a consensus of the nature and function of feedback Feedback as viewed by Furnborough and Truman (2009) entails the existence of gaps between what has been learned and the target competence of the learners, and the efforts undertaken to bridge these gaps Similarly, Keh (1989, p 294) suggests that feedback is “input from a reader to a writer with the effect of providing information for revision" Additionally, Renandya and Richards (2002) state that: “for students who write only one draft, which is then graded by the teacher, feedback on what is wrong in the composition comes too late" This means that feedback should be provided in the “process of writing” rather than in the “single act of producing a text” 1.2.2 The benefits of teachers’ feedback to writing Lewis (2002) sums up the five benefits of giving feedback First, Feedback provides information for teachers and students Second, feedback provides students with advice about learning Third, feedback provides students with meaningful and individual language input Fourth, feedback is a form of motivation Finally, feedback can lead students towards autonomy One long-term purpose of feedback is to lead students to the point where they can find their own mistakes In many cases, teachers indicate the place and type of error without correcting or underlining They require students to find and correct the mistake themselves 1.2.3 Approaches to feedback giving 1.2.3.1.The single-draft approach: This approach is popularly used in traditional classes where teacher's written feedback seems straightforward 1.2.3.2 The multiple-draft approach: The multiple-draft approach is applied in “process writing" classes where students may write several drafts which are read and commented on or edited by the teacher Then students are required to re-write, using the feedback offered by teacher 1.2.4 Types of teacher feedback Teachers' feedback can be conducted in many ways: dialog journals, written comments on students' draft or student-teacher conferences However, the author of this study addresses some types of teacher's written feedback and how these types influence the student revision 1.2.4.1 Formative feedback versus summative feedback 1.2.4.2 Negative feedback versus positive feedback 1.2.5 Focus of teacher feedback More evidence of progress and higher quality of the writing as a whole has been observed in groups of students who receive feedback on content only or combination of both content and grammar (Ferris and Hedgcock, 1998) This finding suggests that feedback needs to focus more on content than on form, or a combination of both 1.2.6 Forms of teacher feedback According to Ferris (1997), teacher feedback generally operates within four basic syntactic forms: question, statement, imperative, and exclamation, which present different pragmatic aims such as giving or asking for further information, making request for revision, giving positive feedback It is true that the composition teachers can use these forms to provide feedback to their students However, they should be aware of the potential problems that each form presents In addition, Hendrickson (1976) suggests language teachers use various direct and indirect techniques when providing feedback to students’ writing 1.2.7 Issues in the teachers' written feedback 1.2.7.1 Traditional “marking” 1.2.7.2 Appropriating students’ texts 1.2.7.3 Overlooking the students’ varying levels of writing ability 1.2.8 Principles of teachers’ written feedback Ferris (2003) provides a list of considerations concerning teacher feedback which focuses on communication and process; the most important of which are the following First, Feedback should include all the aspects that relate to writing, such as content, structure and grammar Second, Feedback should be comprehensible and non-appropriative Third, Feedback has to take into consideration contextual variable, especially in the case of L2 learners In summary, the chapter has so far touched upon issues relating to the topic of the study It has discussed issues concerning writing in general and teacher feedback in particular - approaches to teaching writing, the purposes, the focus, the types and the forms of feedback as well as some problems in teachers’ written response On the basis, the chapter has recommended principles of teacher’ written feedback following some well-known scholars The following chapters will display the methodology and the findings under the light of the above-discussed theoretical background to the teaching writing and theoretical background to feedback CHAPTER II : METHODOLOGY This chapter is designed to give a brief description of research methods used during the process of doing the thesis It presents the information about the context of the study, the textbook, the respondents, instruments, data collection procedure and data analysis as well 2.1 The context of the study The study was conducted at Ngo Gia Tu high school, Tu Son town, Bac Ninh province, which has been recognized as a standard national school This year, the school has 1340 students, with an average of 45 students per class There are nine teachers of English and seventy others teaching different subjects Most of them are young and have B.A degree Most of the school students come from the surrounding communes Most of their parents devote to making their learning condition best With respect to English subject, each class receives three periods a week The teaching equipment includes the textbooks, some cassette players for listening and an audiovisual room The students are taught merely the content prescribed in nationally authorized textbooks They are poor at English Of the four skills, writing is considered one of the most boring and difficult to master The writers have to pay attention to skills of planning and organizing as well as skills of spelling, punctuation, word choice and so on The difficulty becomes even more serious because the students’ language proficiency is weak 8 This study is conducted with the hope to help both teachers and students aware of the importance of giving feedback and effective ways to give feedback on student writing 2.2 The textbook The textbooks used to teach English at Ngo Gia Tu high schools are English Basic 10, 11 and 12 They were developed based on the new national curriculum The books are said to follow “learner-centered approach and communicative approach with task-based teaching” (English 10, Teacher’s Manual: 12) Each book includes 16 units and six review units called Test yourself Each unit covers a topic and is sub-divided into five sections: Reading, Speaking, Listening, Writing and Language Focus Each part is supposed to be taught in 45 minutes As one of the three textbooks, “Tieng Anh 11” textbook consists of sixteen units, each of which is sub-divided into five sections The writing lesson which is the fourth in each unit introduced after reading, speaking and listening is designed in the light of theme-based and task-based approaches Each section consists of some tasks and activities with the aim of helping students improve their writing skills of different topics such as writing personal letters, invitation letters or describing information in a table The writing section may begin with a model, followed by activities that guide students through the writing process such as model analysis, language work, and guided writing After that, students are required to produce texts of 120-130 words on familiar topics based on models or prompts for personal or basic communicative purposes All these activities are carried out in a period of 45 minutes 2.3 Participants The subjects of the study are the two groups of grade 11 with the total of 90 students and teachers who are currently teaching English at the school These students were selected as a subset of the population by means of cluster random sampling Of the 90 students, 41 are male and 49 are female Most of these students have learnt English for eight or nine years Their ages range from 16 to 17 61% of these students assumed that their English writing performance was fair and 20% of them said that they were poor at writing Accordingly, the majority of the study subjects are not good at writing The eight teachers participating in the study are teaching English in the school All of them are female teachers Their ages range from 30 to 35 years old One has taught English for years; the rest have more than ten years teaching experience 2.4 Instruments for Data Collection In this study, three main instruments were used They were document analysis, questionnaire and follow-up interviews Data gathered was largely qualitative, but it might also be quantitative 9 2.4.1 Questionnaire for Students This survey questionnaire was divided into two parts Part one was designed to get the sttudents’ personal information which includes their gender, their learning experience (the number of years they have been studying English) and their English writing performance (according their assessment) Part two elicits information concerning the students’ opinions about teachers’ feedback, factors affecting their comprehension of feedback, and their recommendations to improve it There are eleven questions, of which, likert scale was used for question 1, 3, and question 11 was the only open-ended one 2.4.2 Questionnaire for Teachers This also consists of two main parts Part one is about teachers’ personal information such as their gender, their ages and their teaching experience Part two examines the teachers’ purposes of providing feedback, their preferred methods, the various types and forms of feedback they use as well as any strategies used to help the student process their comments effectively and their own problems in constructing and providing feedback The teacher questionnaire comprises 11 questions Question 3, 4, were designed in the form of likert scale arranged from (1) frequently, (2) sometimes, (3) never The last one is open-ended 2.4.3 Follow-up Interview A follow-up interview with two teachers was carried out after the teachers had finished answering the questionnaire It was implemented in Vietnamese in the form of conversation between the researcher and two teachers who are teaching English to the students chosen as respondents for this study The interview was semi-structured with a list of open-ended questions The questions in the interview were based on those in the questionnaire 2.4.4 Document analyses of teachers' written feedback Writing samples with the two teachers’ written feedback were randomly collected and analyzed The teacher feedback provided by the two teachers include three writing tasks of unit 12, 14 and 15 of 11th form textbook These were carried out to describe current practice of feedback giving involving responding method, the feedback focus, feedback types and forms, as well as their problems in responding to the students’ writing Hopefully, this information will be used to confirm the results from other sources so that the result of this study will be more reliable 2.5 Data Collection Procedures The whole process was divided into steps: First, the questionnaires were handed out for both teachers and students Second, the interviews with two teachers were conducted Last, teachers’ 10 written commentary on the students’ writing compositions were examined and analyzed The students’writing regarding teachers’ written feedback of the two classes were collected by the researcher from the second semester of the school year The students were all willing to lend their writings after the researcher ensured them that their name would not be identified in the discussion of the data The copies of these writings contained handwritten commentary provided by the two teachers However, the researcher chose randomly some papers to analyze because these papers were used as the sample of writings collected from the large number of documented students’ writings CHAPTER III : FINDINGS AND DISCUSSION This chapter is designed to present the findings and to discuss the findings of the study It comprises two main sections Section is the findings of the study The other is discussion 3.1 Findings This part presents the answers to two research questions mentioned at the beginning of the thesis 3.1.1 Research question 1: How the teachers give feedback on the student writing? After analysing the data collected from the survey questionnaire for teachers and the observation of the teacher feedback on the writing, the researcher concludes that there are some major problems with the teachers’ responding method in terms of frequency of the teacher feedback on each writing, the feedback types and forms and the focus of feedback as well as their responding strategies They are as follows: - The teachers’ main purpose of giving feedback to the student writing is helping students promote their writing and pointing out students’ strength and weakness - All of the teachers stick to one- short commenting, mixing responding with evaluating in the form of a grade at the same time - For the teacher feedback types, the majority of the teachers frequently use negative and formative or detailed feedback They sometimes utilize positive and summative comments - Feedback in imperatives, questions and underlining errors and indicating types of errors appears to be used most often The others such as exclamations, statements… are sometimes used - Feedback on grammatical, lexical, mechanical errors are more frequently seen on the students’ drafts than on content, organization - The results show that if there are too many errors in the writing, most of the teachers will correct all the major errors, ignoring the minor ones 11 - For the responding strategies, most teachers take students’ level of writing ability into account They usually use simple words and structures when giving feedback However, they never explain the feedback strategies to the students and they never ask students to tell what they thought about feedback they received 3.1.2 Research question 2: What are the students’ opinions of the teacher feedback they receive? The author has drawn some findings from the results of the survey questionnaire for students: - Most of the students realize that the teacher feedback plays an important role in learning writing They expect to receive the teacher feedback more than one an assignment - For the teacher feedback types, most of the students want to receive specific feedback The other small number would like to receive positive, summative or negative feedback - In terms of the teacher feedback forms Feedback in statements, imperatives, exclamations and underlining errors and indicating the types of errors are considered to be useful and very useful The students have low opinion on feedback in the form of questions or only marking errors - The results also reveal that most students wish their teachers to give feedback on both form and content However, they put more emphasis on form - Nearly half of the learners would like their teachers to correct all kinds of errors even if there are too many errors in their writing The other half want their teachers to treat the repeated errors - It is dismal to find out that more than half of the students find it difficult to understand the teacher feedback for it is too general and their teachers use new vocabulary and structures 3.2 Discussion The findings of the study implicate that the teachers’ ways of giving feedback to the student writing at Ngo Gia Tu high school are not effective Most teachers confirm that their feedback to students’ writing is to help students improve the quality of their papers, which is relevant to the most important function of teacher feedback as Penaflorida (2002), Lewis (2002) have stated However, what teachers have done is ineffective Firstly, the frequency of giving and receiving feedback indicates that the teaching writing approach, which all the teachers are applying, is product-based approach Accordingly, the teacher feedback method they are using is the single draft approach Therefore, students lack practice as they are not encouraged to write multiple drafts of a work One possible result is that students put their corrected assignments/papers in a folder and never look at it again 12 Secondly, the findings of the study show that the teachers usually use some certain feedback types such as negative and specific feedback The teachers use specific feedback more frequently than summative one, which makes teachers themselves focus on discrete items or parts of writing but neglect the overview of the student writing What’s more, they use more criticism than praise on the students’ papers This leads to the students feeling that their teachers are errors hunters, not helpful readers whose comments would encourage them to write more and further develop their ideas in the next writing Thirdly, feedback on grammatical errors, vocabulary and word choice are frequently responded to the students’ drafts These findings show that the teachers focus more on form than on content, which partly meets the students’ expectation in terms of the focus of feedback However, both the teachers and learners seem not to realize that the students’ second drafts might be perfect in grammar but lack in substance Moreover, feedback in imperatives, underlining errors and indicating the error types appear to be used the most often These are also the teacher feedback forms that students prefer to receive in their writing Other feedback forms such as questions, exclamations are rarely used The teachers should realize that each form of feedback has its own benefit and shortcoming (Hendrickson (1976) and Allwright (1975)) The teachers’ feedback from the observation of students’ drafts has shown that their correction is not consistent and systematic That is, they use different techniques or forms of feedback to correct a certain type of error One more thing is that sometimes, the errors are underlined with red ink and no suggestion for correction which makes students not know how to correct the mistakes Obviously, it is necessary for teachers and students to be well informed of the usefulness of each technique as well as the criteria of composition evaluation in order to make the giving and taking feedback in writing more effectively Additionally, the findings state that most teachers take students’ level of writing ability into account They often use simple words and structures when giving feedback In contrast, students say that their teacher feedback is not easy to understand because of new vocabulary and structures So, what is the reason? Most informants admit that they are poor at English and also bad at writing skills They are not knowledgeable enough to understand and process their teacher feedback Last but not least, all the teachers in this study are new to the ideas of getting response from their students as to the effects of the feedback on the students’ revision One of the main reasons is that they not have enough time to so The teachers, therefore, have missed a good chance to get to know more about the students’ feelings and opinions on the feedback they receive In fact, 13 different students will address and utilize the teachers’ feedback in different way as they are differed in terms of low-ability or high-ability writers The later one will handle the teachers’ feedback more successfully than the former In other words, the low-ability writers will have difficulty solving the problem of their own papers if the teachers give unclear or general comment In conclusion, there is a misfit between what the teachers provided in their feedback on the student writing and what the students would like to get at Ngo Gia Tu high school Students had a tendency to ignore the feedback given by the teachers or they express negative attitudes towards feedback, objecting to the focus, techniques, forms and types used by the teachers Consequently, the teacher’s feedback is monotonous and not helpful to improve the quality of the students’ learning and performance PART THREE : CONCLUSION I Conclusion This study has been done with the aim of investigating the teachers’ corrective feedback on the student writing The literature review has made with the hope to demonstrate the scope of the study theoretically in terms of teaching writing and feedback giving The findings from the data analysis show that the teacher feedback on the 11th form student writing at Ngo Gia Tu high school is problematic There is misfit between what the teachers often give and what the students would like to get Although both teachers and students are aware of the great importance of feedback on the writing, they not pay due attention to it What feedback the teachers often give is irrelevant to theoretical principles given by the linguists stated in the literature review Therefore, the teacher feedback does not fulfil its aims, to help students improve the quality of their writing This study also implies that writing is an important but difficult skill for the students to acquire However, rewriting is equally important and difficult because it is an act of improving and promoting students’ writing ability Therefore, it is essential for the researcher to propose some suggestions with a hope to help the teachers and students to change the current practice, making the teachers’ commentary essentially one of the most valuable pedagogical tool for the student’s writing improvement II Recommendations In order to make the teachers’ written feedback more effective and to help students improve their writing ability, some suggested solutions are indicated as follows: 14 The administrators should reduce the class size to about 20 students or less for one group when learning English and double the time for each writing period With this reasonable class size plus appropriate number of papers to weekly respond to, the teachers will be able to devote their time and energy to giving appropriate and detailed feedback for the students’ benefit In the role of writing teachers, they should take into account the following advice - They should follow the multiple drafts approach to give feedback to the writing - They should comment on both content and form of the student writing because they should not only cater to the students’ need but also shift those expectations according to what contributes most to the development of writing skills - They should balance the comments of praise and criticism, taking the advice of Reid (1993) that “as they write, receive response, and revise, students should be able to feel good about what they have done well and realize that they can improve on what they have not done effectively” - They should explain the feedback strategies before applying them, using suitable vocabulary and structures in feedback If using the coding system, they must be sure that their students understand the codes’ meaning - They need to be flexible in using and combining the forms or techniques together with their pragmatic intention to each error item III Suggestions for further study Although the study has achieved the objectives set at the beginning, it cannot avoid some limitations The research only investigates the corrective feedback of the teachers in one particular teaching situation- the 11th form students at Ngo Gia Tu high school Further studies can look at the teacher feedback on the variety of respondents’ writing Due to the shortage of time and knowledge and the limited framework of a minor thesis, many other types of feedback that have not been touched in this research Therefore, further studies should aim at other types of feedback such as oral teachers’ feedback, peer- responding, selfediting, conferencing Also, the findings of this study can be used to make comparative and contrastive analysis with other types of feedback so that we can find out which feedback is more effective for students to improve their writing Obviously, mistakes are unavoidable Therefore, all valuable comments, advice and suggestions from teachers, colleagues and friends will be highly appreciated by the author