Improving Medical Students’ Essay Writing through Direct Focused Corrective Feedback, Revising Errors, and Group Discussions

Abstract

Background: Writing in English has always been emphasized in educational programs.Objectives: This study aimed at investigating the effects of direct focused written feedback followed by amendments and group discussions on improving students’ English writing in different fields of medical sciences.Methods: The present research employed a quasi-experimental design. The participants were 168 Iranian undergraduate students from seven entire classes (taught by the main researcher), studying at Ahvaz Jundishapur University of medical sciences in 2019-2020. The writing tasks were the topics suggested at the end of each unit of the Inside Reading ("Intro" and "One") series. The length required for each topic was a paragraph with a hundred words at most. After writing each essay, the researcher spotted grammatical errors, recorded their types and frequencies, and gave direct feedback. The students received the corrected essays, and through group discussions and based on extra explanations provided by the researcher, the students became totally informed of their errors and were asked to apply this knowledge on their succeeding works.Results: Wrong tenses ( 30.47%), incorrect articles (23.48%), word order (17.48%), singular/plural nouns (11.59%), prepositions (10.90%), and subject-verb agreement (6.08%) were found to be the most common errors, respectively.Conclusion: Comparing the number of errors in the first essay with the errors spotted in the second and third essays showed that the corrective feedback was effective in improving the medical students’ essay writing.

Keywords

• writing
• feedback
• medical education