Evaluation of Sachs & Polio (2007) by Hung-Tzu

Sachs, R., & Polio, C. (2007). Learners’ uses of two types of written feedback on a L2 writing revision task. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 29, 67-100.

Reformulation refers to a native speaker's rewriting of an L2 learner's written composition in order to make the language seem more nativelike, while keeping the content of the original intact (Thornbury, 1997). Through three-stage composition-comparison-revision tasks, Sachs and Polio’s study (2007) examined first, the effectiveness of reformulations versus written error corrections; second, the relationship between higher quality noticing and revision outcome; and third, whether think aloud while comparing reformulated writings make a difference in linguistic accuracy of learner revision.

Fifteen adult learners of English participated in a repeated measure study with three experimental conditions: error correction, reformulation, and reformulation + think-aloud condition. Though this first experiment suggested that noticing of feedback was related to accuracy of subsequent revision, the error correction group outperformed the reformulation group probably because the error correction group had more time to memorize corrected forms. A second experiment was carried out to in attempt to eliminate the time variable. The nonrepeated measure design with 54 learners found similar results that reformulation did not prove to be more helpful than error corrections. Also, learners who were in the reformulation group outperformed their counterparts in the reformulation + think aloud group. Sachs and Polio suggested that while verbal protocols gave insights on learner-internal process in relation to written feedback, results on the effectiveness should be interpreted with care.

I do not think this article is the best option to be included in our course reading mainly because I doubt the feasibility of using reformulation as a feedback technique in writing courses. The problem lies not only in the time and effort required from the teachers to rewrite every student's composition but also the possibility that such technique could greatly endanger learners' ownership in writing. The study did not include any discussion on such concerns. In explaining the process of reformulation, the researchers indicated that grammatical errors, style, cohesion, and vocabulary were all part of the correction. This to me, is a very vague description on just how much rewriting was done.

While I feel that reformulation might not be the most practical written feedback in writing classrooms, I did enjoy the discussion on think-aloud as a measure of noticing. The researchers pointed out the difficulties in coding and determining awareness in metalinguistic verbalizations and also discussed the complex relationship between noticing during think aloud, accuracy in revision, and long-term acquisition.

The study might be useful for those considering using think-aloud as an effectiveness measure, but overall, my evaluation to the article is not recommended.