Students’ Preferences for and Responses to Teacher Feedback in Writing Skills Course

This paper investigates students’ preferences for and responses to teacher feedback in writing skills course. The subjects of the study were 90 first year students who were taking Basic Writing Skills(EnLa 2043)course in School of Computing and Electrical Engineering, Institute of Technology, Bahir Dar University, A questionnaire was used to collect data for the study. The results of the study revealed that students tend to receive teacher's feedback on grammar, mechanics and vocabulary. As compared to other forms of feedback they would like the teacher to correct all the errors they commit. This is of course unlikely for the teacher to do this task especially in large classes. With regard to the kind of feedback they receive, they seem satisfied with the teachers’ feedback but this might have led students not to be sympathetic with peer feedback. The result also indicates that written feedback should be specific and more informative than simply putting codes and symbols or a letter grade on the paper. After receiving their papers back, as the results show, students would like to give attention most of the time to teachers’ comments and corrected and indicated errors. In addition to these students’ responses show that they face a challenge of understanding teacher's written feedback/comments due to the use of difficult words and lack of clarity. This indicates that teachers should give due attention to this while writing comments.