Friday, August 31, 2007

Evaluation of Ferris (2006) by Sachiko

Ferris, D. (2006). Does error feedback help student writers? New evidence on the short- and long-term effects of written error correction. In K. Hyland & F. Hyland (Eds.), Feedback in second language writing: Contexts and issues (pp.81-104). New York: Cambridge University Press.


Debate about the value of providing corrective feedback on L2 writing has been prominent in recent years as a result of Truscott (1996) who claimed that it is both ineffective and harmful and should therefore be abandoned. Dana Ferris is probably one of the most well-known researchers who have rigorously refuted Truscott by providing additional evidence on positive effects of error feedback in L2 writing. This book chapter is her latest work that summarizes research findings on: (1) the effects of error feedback on improvement in the short run and in the long run; (2) the impact of teacher marking strategies on students’ revisions; and (3) the relationship between error types and error treatment. Data for the study was collected in six sections of an ESL composition class where students (N=92) completed four three-draft persuasive essays over the semester. In order to investigate students’ long-term development, all three drafts of the first and fourth essays with teacher feedback were analyzed. The analysis of students’ responses from one draft to the next of a particular paper revealed that the student writers were able to successfully edit errors marked by teachers (80% of all the errors were successfully corrected). However, the longitudinal analysis showed that students’ short-term ability to edit certain types of errors (article errors, lexical errors, and sentence errors) did not always translate to long-term improvement (only “verb-form” demonstrated the progress over the semester). The analysis of teachers’ marking patterns illustrated that students utilized direct feedback more effectively than indirect feedback, since it involved mere transcribing or copying the teacher’s suggestion into the next draft of their papers. However, less explicit forms of feedback also led to accurate revisions most of the time. The analysis of student revision outcomes by error types elucidated that teachers responded to different types of errors in different ways. Specifically, “treatable” errors (errors that could occur in a rule-governed way: verb tense or forms, subject-verb agreement, run-ons, fragments, etc) were more often marked indirectly, while “untreatable” errors (no set of rules students can consult to avoid or fix errors: word choice, idioms, and the sentence structure) were overwhelmingly marked directly.

Ferris’s work fills an important niche in attempting to examine the longitudinal effects of teacher feedback and the effect of different types of feedback (direct/indirect) on different error types (treatable/untreatable). She provided evidence that students’ immediate revisions did not always lead to their longer term development. This evidence implies that students’ ability to utilize teacher feedback to successfully edit one draft for the next of a particular paper is not equivalent to their successful acquisition of the linguistic construct addressed by the feedback, and thus gives us a significant implication regarding the relationship between correction and learning. Ferris’s attempt to classify error types into treatable and untreatable ones is also invaluable. She found that treatable errors were more likely to be marked indirectly than untreatable errors which were more often marked directly. Of particular importance is that the indirect feedback that students received on verb errors may have helped them over time because verb form demonstrated the long-term improvement in accuracy. This means that indirect feedback can encourage learner reflection and therefore trigger the guided learning and problem-solving processes (Lalande, 1982). The evidence suggests possible feedback approach that could be employed by L2 writing teachers (i.e. varying feedback approaches for treatable and untreatable error types, and providing primarily indirect feedback for treatable errors).

Ferris’s study thus provides valuable insights into the effects of error feedback on L2 writers’ texts. However, as I read Ferris’s analysis and discussion of the data, I found myself unsatisfactory in a way I often am when I read feedback research pieces that are non-contextual. I hence doubt whether this article would be useful for our discussion in class. I think that there are at least two contextual factors that should have been addressed more clearly by Ferris: individual differences and classroom realities. First, by highlighting the fact that 80 percent of the total errors (4,590 out of 5,705 errors) were successfully corrected, Ferris claims a strong relationship between teachers’ feedback and successful student revisions. However, 80 percent of the cases does not say anything about how individual students responded to teacher feedback, given that 92 students participated in the study. In fact, the individual differences became apparent in the result of the quantitative analysis, indicating that the standard deviation of the total errors was extremely large. The same is true of a teacher variable. Ferris investigated three teachers’ marking strategies, and identified that their direct feedback accounted for 45 percent of the total corrections, while their indirect feedback with code accounted for 41 percent of the total. However, this triggers questions about individual teacher differences and consistency in treatment. There might have variation among the three teachers in their proportions of direct and indirect feedback. Second, classroom realities, that is, the relationship between class instruction and teacher feedback is unclear. Given that the study was conducted in an ESL composition classroom and the task was a persuasive essay, it is legitimate to speculate that a focus of the instruction was on writing as well as grammar, but Ferris’s primary concern in this study was put on grammatical accuracy alone. Such research design is skeptical in that the effect of teacher feedback is examined without regard to what was really taught in class. The issue of context that has been overlooked in research into feedback has been pointed out and discussed in class, and thus I do not think this article would serve as a topic for more productive and constructive discussion in class. My evaluation of this article is therefore “not recommended.”


References
Lalande, J. F. II (1982). Reducing composition errors: An experiment. The Modern Language Journal, 66, 140-149.
Truscott, J. (1996). The case against grammar correction in L2 writing classes. Language Learning, 46, 327-369.