A Study Of Teacher Feedback Impact On Cambodian EFL Students' L2 Writing

Teacher feedback,regarded as a hot topic in the L2 writing field,has aroused the researcher's interest to investigate this area for improving EFL students' L2 writing.This study situates in the Cambodian EFL context,where feedback research is insufficient and the impact of teacher feedback on EFL students' L2 writing largely remains the need for discussion and investigation in the EFL context of L2 writing.This study,therefore,is to investigate two aspects of teacher feedback impact,namely,students' perceptions of teacher feedback impact and students' performances in L2 writing.More specifically,it aims at investigating(1)the Cambodian EFL students' perceptions of teacher corrective feedback on their L2 writing,(2)the impact of teacher feedback on the CAF performance in Cambodian EFL students' L2 writing,and(3)the factors contributing to the impact of teacher feedback on Cambodian EFL students' performance in L2 writing.This study follows a mixed-method research design.It combined quantitative and qualitative methods to collect and analyze data.To find out the impact of teacher feedback on students' L2 writing,this study selected eighty participants to produce English writings.Twenty of them were asked to attend the interview sessions for their perceptions of teacher feedback.The sources of data included written products,semi-structured interviews,and teacher's written feedback.Data collection was completed by implementing the writing task,conducting interviews,and completing teacher's written feedback.The testing and interviews were to collect data to provide the evidence,reliability,and validity of this study.The measures for CAF in L2 writing were frequencies(elaborate frequency,error frequency,or error-free frequency),error types,error-free units,T-units,errors per unit,error-free T-units,and length of product units.For data analysis,this study adopted six procedural aspects,namely,developing the coding schemes for written products,determining measure for CAF in L2 writing,analyzing the interview transcripts,analyzing students' written products,analyzing teacher's written feedback,and processing the quantitative data with SPSS 21.0.In accordance with the interpreted findings of interview transcripts,Cambodian EFL participants perceived L2 writing as a complex and challenging work.Most interviewee students responded that they urgently needed teacher corrective feedback to develop complexity,accuracy,and fluency(CAF)in L2 writing because teachers could help them correct the L2 writing errors and induce self-revision,self-editing,self-correction,or self-repair on L2 writing drafts.Meanwhile,the interviewees attempted to meliorate the language competence in L2 writing-improving the grammatical accuracy,lexical choices,linguistic accuracy,language proficiency,mechanics,and linguistic form and structure.The analysis of students' sample writings showed that the treatments of teacher corrective feedback on L2 writing enabled and benefited Cambodian EFL students to improve the complexity,accuracy,and fluency in L2 writing,particularly in the aspects of syntactic and lexical improvement.Teacher corrective feedback was more effective for the corrections of students' L2 writing errors and the development of students' L2 writing revision,L2 writing skills,and CAF performance in L2 writing.Importantly,direct feedback strategies on L2 writing errors,indirect feedback strategies on L2 writing revision,linguistic aspects as teacher feedback on language writing,and students' intakes of teacher corrective feedback were considered the effect factors to the impact of teacher corrective feedback on Cambodian EFL students' L2 writings.As has been noted from the results and findings,teacher corrective feedback plays an essential role in the learning and teaching of L2 writing.Teacher corrective feedback benefits EFL students to have self-motivation and ensure their CAF improvement in L2 writing,and it changes EFL learners' L2 writing attitudes and challenges and provides EFL students guidelines to ameliorate L2 writing through self-revision,self-edition,self-repair,and self-correction or self-assessment.Additionally,teacher corrective feedback serves as the provision of scaffolding to build EFL learners' confidence and literacy of L2 writing and meliorate L2 writing skills and L2 writing revisions.The variation of teacher corrective feedback is considered as an important issue for both feedback and classroom research design of L2 writing.Significantly,teacher corrective feedback can help Cambodian EFL students improve their performance in lexical choices,mechanics,linguistic accuracy,and language proficiency in L2 writing performance.Finally,this study provides the pedagogical implications,namely,making better use of teacher corrective feedback,learning about the trends in teacher feedback in L2 writing pedagogy,importance of linguistic aspects as the focus of teacher feedback,and understanding of the distinctive applications of teacher feedback.Future investigations can examine more aspects,in addition to CAF,of the effectiveness of teacher corrective feedback impact on EFL students' L2 writings.