With the latest paradigm shift in SLA from Cognitivism to Sociocultural Theory (SCT), more studies are carried out to investigate the efficacy of Written Corrective Feedback (WCF) through a social and cultural lens. A more recent offspring of SCT is Activity Theory which provides an explanatory framework for scrutinizing an activity in a social setting. The present study aimed at investigating ...

The current study examined relationships between expert human judgments of text quality and grammar and mechanical errors in student writing. A corpus of essays (N = 100) written by high school students in the W-Pal system was collected, coded for grammar and mechanical errors, and scored by expert human raters. Results revealed weak relations between grammar errors and holistic essay scores an...

This study was an attempt to examine the supervisors’ and graduate students’ needs for written feedback on thesis/dissertation and juxtaposed them to see how each group views feedback. A mixed-method design was employed to collect the data. Questionnaires and interviews were deployed to collect the data from 132 graduate TEFL students and 37 supervisors from 10 Iranian Universities. Results ind...

An underexplored question, and one with potentially far-reaching implications for the practice of written corrective feedback (WCF), is whether to mark a wide range errors (comprehensive feedback) or focus on few error types (focused in learners’ L2 writing. Despite limited evidence, it argued that comprehensive WCF unsystematic, inconsistent, confusing, intimidating; can cognitively affectivel...

The Open University is always keen to develop ways of enhancing feedback to students, since comments on assignments are a key aspect of the distance tuition process. Students traditionally receive detailed written feedback on their assignment scripts in the form of annotations and corrections as well as separate written comments summarising their overall performance. For foreign language speaki...