Feedback for writing or writing for feedback?

Abstract

Writing has been seen as a problem to many of students and learning to write fluently has been the most difficult of the macro-skills for all languages. From academic writing point of view, drawing attention to the constant needs to draft and revise can be considered one of the important ways to encourage students to be responsible for making improvements themselves. The best way to learn how to write is to be evaluated continuously across writing. Here feedback plays an important role in writing process. Considering the problems in writing classes, the aim of this study was to investigate a training procedure through which Language learners can develop self-confidence, be motivated, improve the quality of essays, acquire communicative competence through writing and following feedbacks. This study is triple phased study and the first phase comprised students’ attitude about giving and receiving feedback. The study was conducted for 22 3rd grade female ELT students of UFUK University in Turkey. An attitude questionnaire was administered to elicit students` thoughts about the effectiveness of using feedback in writing classes. The ideas expressed through the questionnaire revealed that ELT students has mostly positive attitude toward using teacher-feedback in the case of getting useful points, learning from it, thinking about it before writing, finding it motivated, and making modifications in their writings.