The Impact of Teacher Feedback Via Google Doc in L2 Learners’ Writing

Abstract

Academic writing of assignments is challenging for many undergraduate students of English, and therefore, instructors' written evaluative comments are needed to help students obtain information about their performance in such academic written tasks. As a qualitative case study, this study was carried out on one undergraduate course, specifically on the instructor's written comments on 10 learners' peer academic writing of article reports, how students revise their texts in responding to written comments and how they view such comments and academic writing via Google Docs. The data was collected from the written comments, students’ text revisions and a focus group interview. The findings show that the instructor commented on issues and errors at the global and local levels of academic texts directly and indirectly. Quantification of the data illustrated that the instructor provided the five pairs of learners with an overall number of 1440 which targeted 373 (25%) global issues and 1067 (75%) local issues in the writing of the five pairs. In terms of direction, 977 (68%) accounted for direct feedback, while 463 (32%) accounted for indirect feedback. Distribution of the feedback received by the learners varied across the five pairs of students. The findings indicate that most of the learners’ text revisions were made based on teacher feedback (1187/93%), while only 95 (7%) revisions were self-made revisions. The thematic analysis of the follow-up interview underlies students’ perceived value of teacher feedback in improving their writing, their preference for direct feedback on their writing, their perceived role of Google doc in editing their written assignments. Yet, a few students reported a few restrictions of Google Dos-peer writing and editing. The current study implied that teachers should act as mediators, be aware of the role of feedback in facilitating their students’ development of writing and misinterpretation and confusion their feedback can cause to our students in the process of writing revision, and decide what issues their feedback needs to target, focus on what issues actually challenge their learners in writing. Finally, feedback practices should be made innovative through integration of technological tools.