A Study on EFL College Students' Writing Responses to Different Written Feedback Styles

The purpose of this study is to investigate how college students (CSs) incorporate written feedback in their revision. This study attempts to answer the need for more focused research on feedback among 15 CSs from a college writing class. Three times of CSs' written work were gleaned with the written feedback from the instructor and their two peers and filed respectively. The study then examined how much the students reflected suggestions actually from the different feedback givers in their final drafts. The correction practice of CSs was compared between the written feedback types with students' original writings and incorporated comments. CSs showed different actual correction when they were given the comments with detailed suggestions and when with correction symbols without any examples. They were rather reluctant to conform to the comments with the correction terms that they did not fully grasp the meaning. Thus a further study with more opportunity of the correction symbols to students is needed to understand Korean CS's writing incorporation tendency to improve their writing. By and large, students adopted positively the instructor's formative feedback and their peers' corrective comments. The process of developing final drafts is described and implications of the findings are discussed.