Preferences of 1st year high school students and teachers at the Araucanía region regarding written corrective feedback

Abstract

Written corrective feedback is an important practice for the students' learning process, it provides them with the opportunity to develop their writing skills and improve at each step. This paper investigates the types of written corrective feedback preferred by students and teachers from la Araucanía region. The types of written corrective feedback can be direct or indirect, focused or unfocused. For this mixed methodology study, 234 1st year high-school students, from public and subsidized high schools, participated. The students had to respond to a 10-statement preferences questionnaire. On the other hand, 6 English teachers who work at those high schools were interviewed. The quantitative data were analyzed descriptively, as well as through comparing the average values in a T-test, while the qualitative data were interpreted through a content semantic analysis. The results showed that students preferred direct corrective feedback, likewise, English teachers tend to use direct feedback when correcting written assignments. This means that students preferred teachers to give them the right answer when a mistake was found and teachers preferred to let students know what was the correct answer immediately. Teachers state different reasons about why they apply direct corrective feedback, some of them are: time, number of students per class and to be aware of their students' self-esteem. It is important to know which type of corrective feedback students prefer as it will allow teachers to know how to correct and to enhance their students writing skills.