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The Korean Association for the Study of English Language and Linguistics
[ Article ]
Korea Journal of English Language and Linguistics - Vol. 19, No. 3, pp.432-451
ISSN: 1598-1398 (Print)
Print publication date 30 Sep 2019
Received 31 Jul 2019 Revised 10 Sep 2019 Accepted 19 Sep 2019
DOI: https://doi.org/10.15738/kjell.19.3.201909.432

Does Tutor Feedback Make a Difference? Focusing on EFL Korean Student Writing

Sookyung Cho
Professor, Department of English Linguistics and Language Technology Hankuk University of Foreign Studies 107 Imun-ro, Dongdaemun-gu Seoul, Korea, Tel: 02) 2173-3194 sookyungcho@hufs.ac.kr

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to see how tutor feedback affects a student’s writing. To date, studies on tutor feedback have focused on how tutor-student interactions affect student writing, and thus the effects of a tutor’s written feedback have not been extensively studied. In order to fill this gap, this study keeps track of how tutors’ written feedback affects student writing in accuracy, complexity, and fluency, by comparing and contrasting when they received written tutor feedback with when they did not. Also, this study aims to examine what types of tutor feedback are helpful to the students and how they perceive tutor feedback by analyzing the tutor feedback, the students’ incorporation of it, and their questionnaires. The results reveal that when the students received tutor feedback, they produced more fluent writing, which could be explained by their tendency to incorporate the tutors’ content-oriented feedback more than that grammar-oriented ones. Furthermore, most students evaluated tutor feedback positively and expressed that they would have liked to receive more tutor feedback. These findings suggest that tutor feedback should be utilized in a writing classroom, in particular, in the EFL context where students do not have many chances to receive written feedback.

Keywords:

tutor feedback, feedback incorporation, second language writing

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by Hankuk University of Foreign Studies Research Fund of 2019.

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