‘WHAT DO I NEED FEEDBACK FOR?’

Abstract

The most recent didactic and pedagogical proposals consider that it is essential to provide some kind of feedback to students’ written works (Hyland 2003; Sheen 2010), not only for learners to develop their writing skills but also to improve their own proficiency in the language-culture. In this sense, the present article will first present different types of feedback that can be given to students, namely written feedback from the teacher, face-to-face teacher-student encounter and feedback from classmates (Hyland 2003; Liu & Hansen 2002). Secondly, we will analyze written works carried out by our B1 level students, focusing our attention on the teacher’s written feedback in order to understand if there is any impact on the learners’ texts improvement. We also intend to understand which feedback will be the most effective one to achieve the so said improvement. Among the conclusions we were able to reach, there is a clear improvement in the learners’ texts after the rewriting phase has been completed. We also concluded that, for intermediate levels, multiple or mixed written feedback is the most effective one in the correction/rewriting process.

Keywords

• Writing tasks
• Feedback
• Development of Portuguese language-culture
• Chinese learners