Delivery of written assessment e-feedback to year abroad Mandarin learners

Abstract

Feedback plays an essential role in student learning. It is relatively easy to provide learners with feedback in a face-to-face teaching setting. When they are at a distance, it is necessary to reconsider the delivery of feedback to meet students' academic and emotional needs. In this small-scale study, targeted learners studied Mandarin at equivalent CEFR B1 level and they received screencast feedback on writing assessments while on year abroad and the feedback was focused on detailed syntactical and lexical corrections. The study aims to understand student and teacher perceptions of this kind of screencast feedback and student uptake. The findings reveal video feedback enhanced the student feedback experience, but the existence of such feedback did not lead to students actively engaging with feedback. It also reveals that despite recognizing the pedagogical value of this practice, teachers were concerned about the process being time-consuming. To make the feedback process more efficient and effective, the study suggests it is necessary to further promote student and teacher feedback literacy.