Training EFL Learners How to Benefit from Teacher Feedback in Writing Revision

Training EFL Learners How to Benefit from Teacher Feedback in Writing Revision

This study aims at investigating how Korean EFL university student writers undergo training in revision with teacher feedback with an ultimate goal to suggest in what way they need to be trained to use teacher feedback effectively. It specifically purposes to examine how they incorporate teacher feedback in their revision through a succession of revision training procedures, and also to analyze changes in feedback incorporation after the training, the quality and product of their drafts, and their perceptions on teacher feedback and the training. It also explores whether Korean students’ utilization of teacher feedback varies across functional types of feedback and of in-class revision activities. The results of the training show that Korean students benefited from in-class revision and group revision over off-class or individual revision, though their revised drafts with teacher feedback are of better quality than the original draft regardless of revision setting. They also illustrate individual variations; the importance of how to group; the problem of the lack of language resources; and the influence of functional types and specificity and concreteness of feedback on its incorporation in revision. The findings from the study suggest a revision training with a focus on how to help EFL learners get access to language resources to find appropriate grammatical structures or expressions.