Developing students’ argument-building skills in essay writing through oral and written feedback

Abstract

It is essential for language learners to get feedback either from peers or teachers because feedback is helpful for students to achieve the target language. In writing class, it is common for teachers to give written and oral feedback during the learning process, yet the teachers’ written feedback is sometimes not well-understood by the students because the feedback are not further clarified by teachers. This research examined the role and effectiveness of oral and written feedback in developing students’ argument-building skills, student uptake as well as student and teacher perception of feedback while writing essays in EFL classrooms. We planned to use a number of feedback types as oral - Teacher-Student conferencing, Peer review, Whole class discussion and written corrective feedback - as explicit, implicit and uncoded. The results indicated that two types of feedback, namely, teacher-student conferencing where teachers and students exchange their roles back and forth and they both have equal chances to talk, to ask questions and clarify the errors and uncoded feedback were significantly effective whereas the implicit and explicit were less effective. However, learners considered all types of feedback fruitful as they support them in writing essays.