Assessment of the practice of Written Corrective Feedback in EFL Writing Exercises: The Case of Debark Millennium Secondary School Grade Nine

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to assess the teachers’ and students’ perceptions about written corrective feedback in the development of writing skills at Debark Millennium secondary school, Grade nine students. To achieve this aim, descriptive research design was employed Accordingly to collect the required data questionnaires and interviews were administered to teachers and sample of students. In addition, sample of written exercises of students were inspected using a checklist. For the questionnaire all 6 teachers teaching at grade nine and 222 randomly selected students of grade nine were included. For the interviews, two teachers and six students were made to participate. And 20 students’ written works marked by teachers were considered to identify the type and frequency of feedback given. Analysis of teachers and students responses on questionnaires, made using SPSS computer software, and interviews as well as feedbacks given on students written exerciseswere analyzed thematicallys. Results indicate that teachers tend to consider almost all errors they observed on students written exercises to provide feedback. Of which the use of tense - present, past, future considered as the first rank; wrong use of punctuation & connectors second rank; use of articles like the, a/an; spelling errors & wrong use of pronouns third rank; sentence structure & subject verb agreement forth rank. And the ways they react to such errors include observing students when they write and giving them direct feedback, writing the correct answer, putting rules for writing in the classroom and writing common writing errors on the board, etc. In addition to this, both teachers and students believe that feedbacks given are insufficient in amount, variety and timeliness and thus do not satisfy students’ needs and expectations. Regarding the perceived difficulties of teachers in providing feedback to students’ written exercises grouping students based on their writing needs was found to be the most frequent and number one difficulty followed by managing the class while checking students’ writing exercises and problem of students understanding of comments written in English. As the findings also indicate, most of the time those feedbacks given to students were perceived to be important to improve their writing exercises. It was noted that from the students’ side, feedbacks given were carefully read, understood and used to improve writing skills. Such results were compared with other studies and found to be consistent with most of the local and international studies. Finally recommendations were made to different parties based on the findings of the study. The need to improve the quality, quantity and timlyness of giving WCF for teachers, reducing class size to at least MoE standard to school authorities, etc. were to mention some of the recommendations