Research On How Teacher Comments Influence Students' Motivation For Writing

This thesis explores how teacher comments influence students' motivation for writing in EFL composition classes. The driving force behind the thesis stemmed from an interest in how to provide more effective and relevant feedback to students.Developing students' writing ability is known as one of the major goals to be achieved in English teaching and teacher comments are an essential aspect of the English writing course. This is especially true nowadays with the predominance of the process approach to writing, which requires some kind of second party feedback, usually from the instructor, on student drafts. So dependent is current writing instruction on teacher feedback that Kroll (2001) describes it as one of the two components most central to any writing course, with the other being the assignments students are given. Teacher comments could teach skills that help students improve their writing proficiency to the point where they are cognizant of what is expected of them as writers so that they are able to effectively convey their ideas with minimal errors and maximum clarity. With this in view, much fruitful research into this field is inevitably needed and the recent years have gladly witnessed an increasing interest in it, both at home and abroad. This thesis, with an overview of the existing literature and its focus on students, is intended to shed its new light on this field. It is expected that the study will provide some useful hints at how to comment student writings, which will be welcomed by the teachers of the EFL writing course, and consequently, it will show a new insight into the teaching of this course so that the improvement of students' writing ability is predictable.This thesis first examines the theoretical rationale for the present research from five angles: 1. the theory of process writing and revising;2. the theory of feedback;3. the theory of teacher comments;4. the theory of error correction;5. the theory of motivation. Then, this thesis reviews the pertinent literature on the practice of teacher commenting and also on the broader issue of student attitude. This thorough reviewdraws a conclusion that much attention has been paid to teacher comments on student essays in LI writing classrooms. However, it also shows: (1) there is an inconclusive discussion about the effectiveness of teacher comments on student essays in LI classrooms;(2) there is an obvious lack of research about the effects of teacher comments on the motivation of EFL students for writing. In view of this, this study seeks to address the following question: How do teacher comments influence or change the motivation of three different types of students (students who are highly-motivated, motivated, and non-motivated) in EFL composition classes? Thus the present research is designed to find an answer to this question.Many LI composition theorists have conducted researches on teacher comments using student revision as a measuring stick. While revision is an important variable that deserves thoughtful scrutiny, many researchers have made diverse assumptions about revision. Some theorists have assumed that every student essay deserves revision;others have presumed that a student who wants to revise an essay knows how to repair it. The researcher argues that "student motivation" must be carefully defined in order to provide another — if not better — method of measuring the comments that teachers spend so much time making. Employing a preliminary survey of students in Foreign Languages School of Shandong University of Technology (hereafter referred to SDUT), the researcher defined motivation based on 1) students' reason for taking the English writing course, 2) how often students write in English outside of class, and 3) how students feel about their own English writing ability. The researcher isolated teacher comments in this case study to show how comments (explicit, implicit, positive reader responses, summary comments, and comments in general) influence or change the motivation of students who, at the very beginning, are highly-motivated, motivated, and non-motivated.The study lasted one semester. The qualitative approach was applied in the study with the help of instruments including questionnaires, interviews and student essays. The primary data for this study are from the subject students' answers to twoquestionnaires, their responses in the interviews, and their commented-on essays. The subject students involved in this case study were eleven sophomores who were taking a basic English writing course taught by three instructors separately. At the beginning of the Spring Semester of 2004 the original survey about their motivation for English writing was designed and then administered to 238 English majors in 7 classes of Grade 2002 in Foreign Languages School of SDUT. Based on the students' answers to the three main questions on the questionnaire, four students were selected as the subjects from each motivation category. During the following three months, the researcher conducted several interviews with them to discuss their essays and their attitudes toward the written comments on their essays. Through these interviews and a detailed analysis of the teacher comments on their essays, the data and material were collected and analyzed to appraise the effectiveness of teacher comments. In the 16th week of the semester a final questionnaire was administered to the case-study subjects as well as a control group of 12 subjects that were not interviewed.An analysis of the data suggests that the EFL writing teachers concerned in the study wrote their most positive comments to the highly-motivated student writers while they gave only a few positive reader responses to the students who were the least motivated for English writing. While the researcher originally hypothesized that teacher comments would affect students' motivation for English writing, the reverse is just as likely. Student motivation may help decide what type of comments teachers write on student essays in the first place. A larger-scale study would indicate whether these findings could be generalized to a more sizable population of EFL writing instructors.As the findings imply, students from every motivation level, as well as from a control group, reported that teacher comments affected their motivation for writing in English more than any other teaching strategy, regardless of the number of positive comments they received on essays. This justifies the necessity of teacher comments in EFL writing classes. Further, this investigation demonstrates that when teacher comments are interpreted as an extension of a nurturing instructor, students' motivationcan be increased, even when negative comments are written on their essays. However, students who perceive an instructor as rigid or hostile interpret all teacher comments as personal criticisms and undergo notable decreases in motivation. In general, the study has some implications for the teaching of EFL writing.The main limitations of the study were realized as the following: 1. Students' motivation for EFL writing is not merely affected by teacher comments, but also by other factors, including their attitude toward the language, their overall language proficiency, their busy study schedule and their personal perception of the instructor, which can not be all covered in the study;2. In this case study, one of the criteria for defining motivation (how the student perceives his own English writing skills) affects another (reason for taking the class). This indicates that this definition of motivation may be too narrow and should not include a student's reasoning for taking the English Writing course at the end of the academic term. Further research would benefit from using the classification system of teacher comments in this study, while employing tighter criteria (which do not overlap) for defining motivation.