Institutional Forces and L2 Writing Feedback in Higher Education
There has recently been growing interest in the relationship between second language (L2) writing development and the institutional contexts in which this process is embedded. The present study examines this relationship by reporting on an eight-month qualitative investigation of international university students and their perspectives on the impact of feedback practices for L2 writing development in content courses. Drawing on interviews with five focal students and four focal instructors, as well as on writing samples and course documents, this study illustrates the powerful but often unspoken impact that institutional factors such as departmental budgets and prescribed grade distributions have on L2 writers and their instructors. These factors are shown to constrain students’ and instructors’ abilities to discuss how discipline-specific writing is structured and how it might be negotiated and ultimately understood. Implications focus on the challenges of helping L2 students develop academic writing skills without also addressing the institutional factors that underlie writing and feedback practices.
Un intérêt croissant s’est récemment manifesté envers la relation entre le développement des aptitudes d’écriture en langue seconde (L2) et les contextes institutionnels dans lesquels ce processus se déroule. La présente étude examine cette relation et présente un rapport portant sur une enquête qualitative de huit mois auprès d’étudiants universitaires de l’étranger et leurs perspectives sur l’effet du feedback sur leur écriture dans des cours de contenu. Des entrevues avec cinq étudiants et quatre de leurs instructeurs, ainsi que des échantillons d’écriture et de documents de cours, illustrent les effets puissants mais souvent implicites que des facteurs institutionnels comme les budgets des départements et la distribution normative des notes ont sur les apprenants L2 et leurs instructeurs. Ces facteurs nuisent au dialogue nécessaire entre étudiants et chargés de cours pour mieux apprendre à écrire dans une discipline. L’étude souligne l’importance de tenir compte des facteurs institutionnels liés aux pratiques d’écriture et de feedback dans un contexte universitaire.
Feedback, second language writing, institutional forces, academic socialization, higher education
Feedback, écriture langue seconde, forces institutionnelles, socialisation universitaire, études postsecondaires [End Page 203]
Recent years have seen an increasing interest in exploring second language (L2) literacy development as a dynamic socialization process whereby learning occurs as students gain membership and expertise through participation and negotiated interaction in the activities of various communities (Duff, 2007b; Ochs & Schieffelin, 2008; Zuengler & Cole, 2005). Research interest in this area of language development stems from its ability to highlight, in addition to psycho-cognitive processes, the social, cultural, and linguistic resources at work, implicitly and explicitly, across a range of language mediated activities, as L2 learners struggle to find their way through a target language’s communicative practices and its related identities, stances, and ideologies (Kulick & Schieffelin, 2004).
Examples of this approach for research in L2 development can be found in recent studies of academic literacy development in higher education (Kobayashi, 2003; Morita, 2004; Morita & Kobayashi, 2008; Zappa-Hollman, 2007). The work of Kobayashi (2003), for instance, documented the importance of undergraduate students’ behind-the-scenes negotiations and peer-coaching for language and content development as they prepared for in-class presentations. Zappa-Hollman (2007) similarly offered a detailed account of the complexity of academic discourse socialization processes pointing out how, even for advanced language proficiency students, conflicts arise when students’ home literacy values do not match the strategies needed to perform well in English academic presentations. Such studies challenge traditional notions of academic discourse as predictable and fixed literacy practices whose conventions can be transmitted easily to students. Rather, these studies reveal that the acquisition of academic textual practices is a far more complicated and chaotic process that has as much to do with the interactions of various desires, values, abilities, and contextual forces as with any well-established series of rules. Most importantly, this research suggests that the unique variations and contestations of academic discourse in its day-to-day contexts are key to understanding the complex negotiation of students’ roles and identities as they learn to participate in academic discourses in a second language (Morita, 2004).
The importance of these variations and contestations are particularly apparent when tackling issues of academic writing development. Indeed, few literacy practices, according to Lillis (2001), outdo written assignments as a source of puzzlement, confusion, and even fear among students in higher education. This malaise is even greater for L2 students who typically do not share the cultural and linguistic backgrounds from which dominant academic writing conventions stem [End Page 204] (Ridley, 2004). In particular, at a time when universities worldwide enter an era of internationalized education (Ninnes & Hellstén, 2005), interest in how to better help L2 students write in university settings has become a dominant theme in the field of L2 writing research (Canagarajah, 2002; Casanave, 2002; Kubota & Abels, 2006). This interest is rooted in writing’s key role as the valued mode of communication and assessment in academic disciplines, leading to success in courses and, through the credentials associated to these, to power and privilege in society (Burke, 2008).
Focus of the study: Feedback practices and L2 writing development
Motivated by this interest in the socialization of university L2 writers through their interactions with everyday discourses and contexts, this study specifically focused on the impact of feedback practices for L2 writing development. Feedback practices are defined here as including any interaction about writing, with a ‘guide’ (usually, but not always, an instructor), while referring to a specific text in various states of completion. From this perspective, feedback includes, among other possible forms, written responses to assignments, advice provided in conversations or e-mails about an assignment in and/or outside of class, and tutoring sessions.
Feedback practices and their impact on L2 writing development have long been an area of interest and controversy in the L2 writing literature (Ferris, 2004; Hyland & Hyland, 2006a; Goldstein, 2005). The potential of feedback practices as a powerful tool for writing development is intuitively felt by many teachers and students. Research confirms the validity of this intuition, in part suggesting that, when well implemented, feedback can consolidate learning about writing and provide opportunities to draw students’ attention to the interaction of meaning and form (Ferris, 2003; Hyland & Hyland, 2006a; Qi & Lapkin, 2001). Research also suggests that although students’ responses and preferences to feedback may vary, they do appreciate and take it seriously (Lee, 2004; Leki, 1991; Zhang, 1995).
On the other hand, feedback’s perceived usefulness has been undermined by debates over its proper implementation, its actual uptake by students, and its long-term influence on L2 writing development. Arguments over the potential effectiveness of form-focused feedback on grammatical errors found in written texts stand out here. More than a decade after Truscott’s (1996) claims that corrective feedback’s [End Page 205] impact on L2 students was not only often ineffective but also potentially harmful to students’ writing development, research continues to provide conflicting answers regarding the potential influence of error correction feedback on the acquisition of new structures and accuracy gains in L2 writers’ texts (e.g., Bitchener, Young, & Cameron, 2005; Chandler, 2003; Ferris, 2004; Truscott, 2004, 2007; Guénette, 2007). Similarly, research focusing on feedback comments that go beyond error correction and provide L2 writers with feedback on content and rhetorical aspects of students’ texts have also revealed a number of potential problems linked to L2 students’ variable ability to correctly interpret and make use of these comments (e.g., Goldstein, 2005; Hyland & Hyland, 2001). In short, despite the increasing sense that, if well done, feedback on L2 writers’ texts can result in significant learning, Guénette (2007) points out that many instructors continue to feel ‘left out on a limb’ (p. 41), while Ferris (2004) notes that, from a research point of view, ‘we are virtually at square one’ (p. 56), so that further examinations of feedback remain essential.
In reflecting on the possible shape these examinations might take, there is one issue that stands out, which is that to date a great deal of research on feedback practices has focused on how different forms of feedback have influenced students’ revisions and subsequent drafts of their texts (Ferris, 2003; Goldstein, 2006; Hyland & Hyland, 2006b). Hyland and Hyland (2006b) point out that despite its important contributions, this line of research has overemphasized feedback’s informational function as a means of direct or indirect editing with recommendations most often linked to grammatical corrections. What often remains unexamined in this approach are the interpersonal aspects at stake in feedback interactions and the notion that, in addition to providing corrections, feedback also fulfills social purposes by reflecting and reinforcing individual desires, power relations, and specific institutional contexts. Understanding feedback’s success or failure would thus require paying closer attention to these social functions and how students and teachers enact and interpret them. In so doing, we might better understand the role these unique interactions between disciplinary experts and newcomers play in the socialization of multilingual writers.
Research design
Inspired by prior case studies of L2 writers (Casanave, 2002; Tardy, 2005; Zamel & Spack, 2004), the larger study from which this article [End Page 206] stems examined the feedback practices observed during an eight-month qualitative multiple case study of five Japanese international exchange students attending regular undergraduate courses at Blue Mountain University (BMU),1 a large research-intensive university in Western Canada. Research procedures used in conducting this study stemmed from qualitative enquiry techniques (Duff, 2007a) and focused on providing a ‘fuller, more textured, humanized, and grounded’ (p. 983) account of students’ and instructors’ experiences with feedback and its impact on writing development in the context of content courses. This is an area that, with the exception of a few studies (e.g., Leki, 2006, 2007), remains largely unexplored in L2 writing research where the majority of studies of feedback have occurred in the context of writing classes.
Participants
All participants in this study were Japanese undergraduate students from Nihon Sakura University (NSU) and its sister campus Nihon University International (NUI), participating in their second year of an exchange program with BMU. This program, the result of a longstanding collaboration between NSU and BMU, each year invites approximately 100 Japanese students to spend up to two academic years in Canada.
In their first year of exchange, NSU and NUI students, depending on their TOEFL and GPA scores, take a combination of both sheltered and non-sheltered content courses in areas that include geography, Canadian studies, social science research, and cross-cultural communication. While the majority of the 100 students return to Japan after a year, a select number of students who meet the requirements may choose to stay for a second year of study at BMU, during which time they are free to self-select courses based on their programs of study and personal interests.
My decision to recruit from this specific pool of students stemmed in part from an opportunity that arose at BMU to work with this population in the years prior to this study. Over time, this work experience heightened my personal knowledge and interest in these students’ academic progress at BMU and led to a sense of trust and shared common knowledge between us. I felt this trust would enhance the ability to discuss their perspectives on writing and feedback practices at BMU.
My interest in literacy development in ‘regular’ content courses led to my recruiting participants for this study solely from the pool of students choosing to stay at BMU for a second year of exchange. [End Page 207] Accordingly, in the fall of 2005, an invitation letter describing the study and its goals was sent to all students falling into this category. A total of three males and two females responded positively to this invitation, and all of these students became focal students for this study. These students (see Table 1 below) came from a range of programs that included psychology, linguistics, Asian studies, policy science, and economics. At BMU, they registered for courses in various disciplines (three to five per semester), including courses in anthropology, economics, philosophy, family studies, French, history, psychology, environmental science, political science, statistics, and linguistics. In these courses, focal students wrote and received feedback on a variety of writing assignments that ranged from final research papers, short essay papers, online bulletin board postings, essay exams, take-home exams, group presentations, group papers, to case study simulations.
Description of focal participants
All five of the focal students were in their early 20s and had become close friends in their first year of exchange at BMU. These were highly motivated and hardworking individuals. Three of these students identified themselves as ‘good students’ back in Japan while the fact that they had been invited to participate in this second year of exchange marked them as the top students of their exchange cohort. All had calculated that, despite the challenges entailed by this second year abroad, this opportunity would bring them closer to achieving their individual goals. These goals, which in one way or another also involved the desire to improve their English skills, differed for each student. Hiro and Kaito wished to pursue graduate studies in disciplines such as international environmental policy and cross-cultural psychology. Naoko and Yoshimi wanted to work with international students or in foreign companies in Japan. Kaori intended to pursue a career working with the deaf community and, thus, wanted take courses and in this area that were more readily available at BMU [End Page 208] than at her home university. The sacrifices identified by these students included, but were not limited to, the financial cost of continuing the exchange,2 the much increased workload resulting from studying in a second language, and the disadvantage of staying one more year out of the Japanese university system at a time typically spent making crucial connections and preparations for the job-hunting process that would follow their graduation.3
Data sources
The primary source of data collection for this study was biweekly interviews with focal students held from September 2005 to April 2006. These interviews were conducted in English and lasted an hour on average. Each student was interviewed approximately seven times per semester for a total of 74 interviews, which totalled in excess of 75 hours of conversations. All interviews were audio recorded, summarized, and transcribed.
The interviews adopted a semi-structured format (Merriam, 1998), using prepared prompts designed to elicit reflections on L2 writing and feedback in content courses and incorporating follow-up on students’ activities and experiences with writing and any feedback they received. When these materials were available, students were instructed to bring with them the texts and assignments they were working on or on which they had received feedback. When students brought such documents with them, it was possible to conduct what Odell, Goswami, and Harrington (1983) have called ‘discourse based interviews,’ which opened up opportunities to talk about and discuss in detail particular pieces of writing. During such moments, I would review with students specific aspects of their writing assignments, any accompanying responses, and any revisions they had made to their work. The goal was to capture both the students’ perspectives about the feedback they had received and how they felt it might have affected their writing (see Appendix A for sample questions asked during the interviews).
In addition to these interviews, relevant documents linked to the students’ courses and writing assignments (assignment descriptions, drafts of texts, feedback messages, course syllabi, and so forth) were collected. In between interviews, I invited students to contact me whenever they felt something important had occurred that they wanted to share. These communications often took the form of e-mails or electronic instant messaging chats. [End Page 209]
Focal instructors interviewed
Additionally, focal students’ instructors for courses that involved major writing components as identified by their course outlines were contacted in writing at the beginning of each semester inviting them to participate in the study by accepting to be interviewed and possibly have their classes observed. A total of four instructors agreed to participate, each accepting to be interviewed at least once about their feedback practices (see Table 2).4 Two of these instructors also consented to have me observe their classes at times they felt were pertinent to the written assignments in their classes. As with the students, interviews with the instructors were semi-structured in format. Interviews focused on the perspectives and experiences related to the role of writing and feedback in their classes and the strategies they adopted to help develop students’ writing skills (see Appendix B for sample questions the instructors were asked).
In addition to class observations, during the eight months of the study, I conducted fieldwork on campus to add further detail and depth to the insights gathered through the interviews. The almost-daily visits to the campus allowed me to observe and interact with the general student population and faculty. This fieldwork also allowed me to acquire brochures, posters, and other forms of documents available on campus.
Data analysis
Data analysis for the study drew on principles of qualitative inquiry and made use of an iterative process to organize, sort, code, and [End Page 210] search the data while looking for emergent patterns and relationships between these (Denzin & Lincoln, 2003). The data analysis focused first on case specific findings and was then followed by a cross-case analysis to identify intersections and dissonances between informants’ motives and interpretations regarding the practices of writing feedback and the forces that, in their opinion, affected this feedback.
In the analysis process, the multiple data sources collected for this study were used to ensure data triangulation by cross-checking various data sources to examine and verify the factors identified as key to feedback practices. This involved, for example, regrouping and then comparing and contrasting a student’s interpretation in an interview of feedback received on an assignment with the actual assignment and feedback and the interpretation given to this assignment and feedback by an instructor as discussed in interviews or in class. Instructors’ comments about specific policies in their departments were also, for instance, verified by looking through publicly available syllabi and policy documents for that department. Finally, the trustworthiness of the analysis was enhanced further through verifications of the initial data interpretations with the study participants as well as with fellow researchers in the field.
Examples of the final analytic categories that emerged from this process included roles and positions assigned to students and instructors by feedback practices; examples of ‘good’ versus ‘bad’ feedback from students’ and instructors’ perspectives; the importance of alternative sources of feedback and institutional forces; and the impact of feedback on students’ evolving conceptualizations of writing.
In the interests of space, this paper focuses only on one of these major themes: the impact of institutional forces on feedback practices (for more details on other findings resulting from this study, please see Séror, 2008). This theme emerged predominantly as a result of an examination of rationales offered to explain the nature of the feedback provided to L2 students in their classes. Though this specific report can only focus on a limited set of data, this theme drew on an analysis of various data sources including interviews with focal instructors and focal students, relevant text documents, policy documents, and field notes.
Findings
In order to explore how institutional forces helped to shape feedback practices for the participants in this study, in the first section below I discuss the ideal visions of feedback conveyed by both instructors [End Page 211] and students and how these contrasted with the actual feedback practices they described. In the second section, I explore how instructors linked this gap between desired and actual feedback practices to institutional pressures.
Ideal visions of feedback practices
Throughout the interviews, both students and instructors expressed their belief in the importance of feedback and had clear ideas of what good feedback practices in content courses would look like.
For students, ideal feedback on writing was detailed, timely, and readable (typed feedback was preferable because in the majority of cases students found it extremely difficult to read handwritten feedback). Importantly, in the student’s opinion, the best feedback would also go beyond simply identifying problems in their writing. Rather, the feedback would provide specific advice about what the student could do to solve any identified problems.
Naoko, for example, suggested that feedback from instructors in her classes was ‘too short every time, and I cannot read what they write. They should give clearer and longer feedback. The best feedback would be clear and detailed about the weaknesses and would have suggestions about grammar.’ Further illustrating this desire for more specific solutions to problems in their writing, Kaori showed me a history assignment that had been returned to her, pointing to the single comment written in red next to one of her three paragraph-long answers. The comment read: ‘Use your own words!’ In discussing this comment, Kaori acknowledged she had relied on phrases and terms taken from her textbook. She also pointed out, however, that although she understood the need to use her own words, this comment did nothing to actually help her accomplish this. In other words, she did want to and had tried to use her own words, but what she really wanted was specific advice on how to better paraphrase highly specialized writing – a task identified by all focal students as a significant challenge.
Additionally, although all students expressed an interest in having their grammar corrected, they also stressed that, in content courses in particular, their interest was foremost on feedback that would address their ideas and arguments. When asked, for example, what kind of feedback he preferred, Hiro responded, ‘I expect a comment on my idea, rather than grammar or structure. Like, yeah, the comments on grammar and structure is very helpful for me, but I am more interested in how professors feel about my ideas.’ Similarly, Kaito noted that ‘instructors that correct a lot of the grammar mistakes [End Page 212] are helpful, but they also need to talk about my content,’ because ‘my main purpose is about expressing my ideas.’
Students also favoured feedback opportunities that would allow them to interact and converse with an instructor about their ideas (i.e., face-to-face conversations with reduced social distance between students and instructors were the preferred mode identified by students for receiving feedback on their writing). Although aware that occasions for this type of feedback from their instructors were rare, all students stressed that these opportunities were really the best since they encouraged conversation, gave them more detailed information, and allowed them to ask specific questions and, even at times, disagree with a professor about the feedback. The value given to this type of close and frequent feedback interaction was perhaps best captured by Yoshimi when he explained what he would do if he ever became an instructor:
If I were a professor, I would try to talk to them more . . . try to interact a lot . . . because I would know that even if they wanted to talk to me, that it would be difficult for them. I would try to make more opportunities . . . [and] have more office hours for them.
Instructors’ descriptions of ideal feedback echoed those of students and demonstrated a genuine concern and interest in the challenges faced by L2 students and the possible ways to help them with writing tasks in their courses. When discussing what ideal feedback might look like, instructors referred to the feedback interactions that occurred with their graduate students. They spoke of the importance of ‘learning by writing a lot,’ ‘being edited,’ and going through multiple drafts with ‘lots of dialogue’ and ‘lots of feedback on everything.’
Moreover, all of the instructors concurred that opportunities to receive feedback on their writing should be part of the support services that should be readily available to students, especially those coming from diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds. Such support services were conceived as something that should be a normal part of the education that students were paying for and that would include greater access to writing centres, writing tutors, TAs, and smaller classes than was currently available on campus.
Ideal feedback versus reality
Despite the resonances between students’ and instructors’ conceptions of the form feedback should take, it became clear throughout the study [End Page 213] that there existed remarkable differences between this ideal vision of feedback and the actual feedback practices experienced by students.
Indeed the majority of the feedback practices observed and described in the study often fell short of the feedback desired by students and discussed by instructors. The most common feedback practices involved short, condensed, and handwritten notes in the margins of assignments that students often had problems deciphering. Frequently, these comments contained symbols, check marks, underlined sections, and abbreviations that made the feedback even harder for them to interpret. Additionally, although the feedback received on writing focused heavily on identifying problems, specific solutions to address these problems were rarer. Students expressed their disappointment that the feedback they received focused on grammar and language, often specifically referencing their non-native qualities (e.g., ‘not bad for a second language writer’) while rarely providing the explicit advice or reactions to the ideas contained in the piece of writing sought by students.
Figure 1 contains an illustrative example of problematic feedback discussed by Hiro. It was as a comment on the last page of a major assignment. Not only was this comment very difficult for Hiro to read, it was also a major source of disappointment for him. It was only in the actual interview, with both of us working together, that Hiro and I were able to decipher the message. It read,
You have made some interesting points about the effectiveness of vol [voluntary] programs. However, that is not the question posed by the assignment, which asked how ideas, interests & institutions influenced the adoption/creation of the program.
Example of handwritten feedback received by Hiro
[End Page 214]
At the heart of Hiro’s frustration was the fact that although the comment did contain one unspecific praise item in its reference to his ‘interesting points’, the crucial element missing was a more detailed response to the adaptation and modifications Hiro had made to the key theory related to this topic. Worse, he strongly disagreed that he had missed the point of the assignment and desired more elaboration about the instructor’s interpretation of why, despite his ‘interesting points,’ these had not addressed the question. Hiro’s complaints were echoed throughout the duration of the study by students’ frequent expressions of disappointment with instructors’ statements that failed to comment on their ideas: for example, ‘Actually, I expected he would talk more about the ideas, but he just mentioned about ideas for three sentences. He mostly just talked about grammar.. . . ‘(Naoko); or, ‘They just look at grammar mistakes, not content’ (Kaori). This complaint was a key reason students actively sought greater levels of face-to-face feedback with instructors, despite the fact that such opportunities were extremely limited because of both students’ and instructors’ heavy schedules.
This lack of interaction with class instructors was compensated through clinics in the form of one-on-one tutorials that were available at the Composition Institute, the university’s writing centre. Four out of five of the focal students made use of these services. However, these students were quick to point out that the benefits of this resource were severely limited by a policy that restricted students to a single one-hour time slot per week that had to be reserved in advance through a sign-up sheet posted at the Institute. As suggested by students, one had to be quick and lucky to be able to book a time that fit one’s schedule. In addition to these tutorials, the Institute also offered non-credit writing courses (another form of campus support suggested by instructors as ideal). However, these courses were available only if students paid extra fees in addition to those paid for ‘regular’ classes.
Explaining the gap between ideal and actual feedback
Upon reflection, the gap observed in this study between ideal representations of feedback for L2 writing development versus their realization can hardly be described as surprising. Research on feedback has long reported on L2 writers’ unhappiness with feedback from their instructors (e.g., Dong, 1998; Goldstein, 2006). Nonetheless, ethnographies of literacy practices have repeatedly shown that there is value in placing such gaps at centre stage not only to identify how these might be [End Page 215] bridged but also as a way to better understand the contingent nature of literacy practices on contextual and social forces that may otherwise remain hidden (Canagarajah, 2004; Lillis, 2001).
In exploring the gap that emerged in this specific context, it was of particular interest to discuss with focal instructors’ their rationale behind the feedback they gave students. These accounts not only highlighted the complexity of this practice, they also revealed how institutional pressures at BMU created conflicting interests and goals for these instructors in their approach to providing feedback. To illustrate this, I focus below on three institutional factors identified by instructors: limited resources, merit systems, and grade distribution requirements.
Impact of limited resources
The accounts of what actually happened when feedback was provided and received emphasized the role of resources available to instructors and students. Many of the issues falling into the category of ‘limited resources’ were identified by instructors as institutional concerns, with finances often at their roots. These included, for instance, decisions related to the assignment of TAs in departments, the type and number of instructors hired, class sizes, and financial decisions related to the existence and funding of writing centres and extra writing classes. Directly linked to the allocation of these resources was the issue of time.
A good example of this link between feedback, time, and resource decisions such as the type of instructor hired by a department was described by the sessional linguistics instructor when she talked about her status as a part-time employee at the university:
Being a contract worker, I feel overworked and underpaid. Much of the time, marking you just want to get that out of the way as fast as you can. It is much easier and faster to just underline the part that is missing something or just write just a sentence. And then . . . ? And I hope that the students get it.
The political science instructor had strong feelings about her department’s budget and how a recent decision to limit who would get TAs in the department would affect her ability and motivation to ‘work with students’ and provide them with detailed feedback:
This year the department decided that only untenured faculties would have TAs . . . [As a tenured instructor] why should I have so much more marking [End Page 216] to do, extra work, sort of, you know? I have 200 hours more of marking to do than the person in the next office. That is five full weeks spent marking and nothing else. More than someone else does in the next office. So, I am not looking for ways to add to my marking load particularly this year.
Another topic frequently discussed by focal instructors and more generally by other faculty in informal conversations on the BMU campus was increases in class sizes. One might be able to provide rich detailed feedback in smaller graduate classes, but the greater the number of students, the harder it was for instructors to imagine they would have the time required to provide the kind of feedback most likely to foster literacy development.
Linguistics instructor The problem is you need small classes and need faculty that is around for the students
Researcher Any indications of changes coming up?
Linguistics instructor In our department, in fact, the trend is exactly the opposite, because for instance, the intro course, where we used to offer more sections with fewer students and more TAs. Now we have these mega courses, with 250 students. And then they have two tutorials, which have only 50 students with a TA, where you’re supposed to get the personal one-on-one attention. So, like 50 students in for one hour once a week. I guess everybody gets a minute (laughs).
To summarize, interviews with instructors revealed that a complex interplay of resource allocation decisions affected feedback opportunities by hindering and/or discouraging instructors from investing in feedback.
The focal students’ own insights revealed that they were at least partially aware of how these resource problems affected them, and they were definitely conscious of their instructors’ heavy schedules. They quickly picked up on comments that instructors made in classes, such as ‘I will only reply to e-mails on Thursdays and Fridays,’ ‘Unfortunately, there is no TA for this class,’ or ‘I’m preparing for a conference next week.’ These comments sent out messages about the instructors’ busy lives and helped reinforce the notion that instructors could simply not be expected to have the time to provide ‘good feedback.’ Yoshimi’s comments below illustrate how clear this message [End Page 217] was for him, as he reflected on the difficulties he had getting detailed feedback on his writing from his instructor.
I sometimes feel frustrated irritated . . . but I can understand. She [the prof] is doing her best, trying to teach me . . . She doesn’t want to see me as special or disabled. She doesn’t think she needs to spend time to teach me. She has her own life. She is busy raising her own son, and is busy with department job searches, as the head of the department . . . so she cannot help me a lot.
Impact of merit/reward systems
A second institutional force identified as having a negative impact on the type and quality of feedback students received was the impact of the merit/reward system for instructors.
The role of the university merit/reward system for instructors was echoed in both formal and informal conversations with focal instructors and other faculty members at BMU. In short, giving extended feedback or engaging in individual writing conferences with undergraduate students could be seen as risky and/or a poor investment of time in a research-intensive institution whose reward system, as described by the instructors, did not assign much weight to such teaching activities. Instructors felt research and publications were the more valued activities for determining merit, and that being a ‘world class researcher’ (the goal for many BMU faculty, especially if untenured) was not compatible with spending hours providing feedback over multiple drafts or investing the time needed to help reduce a sense of social distance between L2 students and instructors. In the words of the anthropology instructor,
Research and teaching are not compatible. To a limited extent, people who are high-profile researchers can be good instructors, but the reality is that if you can do that much research, if you [are] going to be that ‘high profile,’ you probably aren’t spending all your time teaching courses. So they’re not exactly compatible.
Impact of grade distribution requirements
In citing why their discussions of feedback practices were less than ideal, all four instructors talked about the pressures they felt to conform to the departmental grade distributions:5 the requirement (more or less strictly enforced within different departments) for marks [End Page 218] to be distributed along a normal curve with a fixed mean and distribution. Whereas this idea of grade distributions was rarely raised by the students in the multiple conversations we had about writing and feedback, all of the instructors stressed this institutional constraint. As illustrated in their comments, they were aware of what the grade distribution requirement meant for them as they self-censored marks, designed their assessment tools, and shaped their feedback to help them conform to this practice. According to the sessional linguistics instructor:
There is tremendous pressure. I mean for awhile there, we had to submit the grades to the chair before we were allowed to enter them. I absolutely self-censor all the time. If there are too many As then I write a killer exam. I make sure that a good number of students are going to do very poorly, or preferably, everybody will do very poorly, and then I can hike up the whole class.
With the pressure to make the grades fit a normal curve, a recurring pattern of what I will refer to as ‘defensive feedback’ emerged in interviews and informal conversations with instructors at BMU, suggesting that feedback practices could have more to do with justifying the necessary low marks than actually helping students develop their writing skills. This notion is captured well in the following conversation with the linguistics instructor:
Researcher I was wondering if one of the other purposes of marking is not some sort of defensive –
Linguistics instructor (interrupting) – oh, absolutely, yes!!
Researcher Because you have to justify the mark, and it doesn’t become as much about –
Linguistics instructor (interrupting) – about helping the student? I mean, if you just write ‘how’ somewhere that’s not going to necessarily help the student understand anything. The only reason it’s there is that that ‘how’ justifies that you took two marks off. So ultimately when you’re marking for really large classes, it’s all just justifying grades and very little of it has . . . anything to do with making the students better students or anything like that. Oh, now I’m all depressed! [End Page 219]
Also falling into the category of ‘defensive feedback’ were the psychology TAs revelations that to ensure that the average for his first and second year courses matched the required 65% for the grade distribution, he strategically focused his feedback and ‘put more weight on the mechanics of the paper’ with ‘major reductions for not citing things properly.’ He did so because these were the things that were ‘very easy to find out and easy [to use] to convince students’ they deserved the mark they had received. When I inquired about any ethical concerns related to an evaluation system that assumed a ‘normal’ population and assessment procedures that were unbiased with regard to social factors such as race, gender, ethnic group, or socioeconomic status, instructors did not hide the fact that this set up a ‘harsh reality’ for international students, and that it was not easily discussed with them.
Political science instructor You know, I think it’s important for students to realize this is, you know, it’s also how you do relative to what else is being turned in, in this class, and sometimes something is a B+ because you know it’s just not as good as some of the others. And you can’t quite, you can’t say that. It would be kind of, I mean you can’t say it because it would be really harsh. But you know, that’s the message. You put the distribution up on . . . and they know that. Um, but yeah we never say . . . this is a B+ just because it’s, you know, it’s just not, just not as good as the others.
Researcher In terms of the international students being put in a situation where they are compared to native speakers . . . Obviously coming with, I mean, I don’t want to say a lot less, but something very different, and hence if you compare them to a native speaker, of course, they’re going to end up more on one side than the other.
Political science instructor Yeah, and they tend to!
As something left unsaid, it seems that this was a case of an institutional force whose consequences students would have a hard time [End Page 220] becoming aware of and criticizing. This point is exemplified in the following conversation with Kaori where we discussed a poor mark she had just received on her mid-term exam. This exam was set up as a series of essay questions, and Kaori had received minimal feedback from the instructor in the margins of her exam. Wanting to better understand why she had received such a low mark and what she could do to improve her writing for the next exam, Kaori went to see her instructor at his office. In reporting what her instructor had said about the way he had evaluated her writing/content, she was surprised as the issue of subjectivity relating to the feedback on her writing, not only on an individual basis but also on a comparative basis, became clearer:
Kaori The instructor said that he looked at the content, [and] because I didn’t write enough I got that grade [on my exam]. My ideas were not sufficient when compared to other students; my reasons are not good enough compared to other students.
Researcher What do you think of this way of evaluating?
Kaori I think it’s okay. It’s okay because I knew that I had not written enough, and my writing is lower than other students.
Researcher But if you were in a classroom with different [students], it would mean that your marks would be higher or lower. If you’re in a classroom with weaker students, does this mean that your mark would be higher?
Kaori (laughs) It’s weird, before I talked to you, I didn’t notice that. I didn’t notice that it’s unfair, but now, I think it’s unfair. Comparing is very subjective.
Most serious perhaps were reports that the grade distribution requirements were discouraging instructors from providing too much good feedback. The anthropology instructor, for instance, clearly identified the dangers of providing feedback that would ‘build up’ the students:
. . . you know you’re going to be in a situation where you’re going to have to be giving and taking back. (laughs) You’re going to build them up. And they’re going to get better and better the more you help them with [End Page 221] everything and even the way you write tests. You tell them, ‘Right you have to write two out of three, instead of having to write all three questions.’ The grades are going to become A’s at the end. You have to take back, because it will never get past the head of the department.
Similarly, the linguistics instructor reflected on the sad situation that emerges when only 25% of the classroom’s population is allowed to ‘do well.’
The thing is that as long as you’re expecting the average to be somewhere in the Cs and you expect only 25% of the population to actually understand what is being taught, then well obviously you don’t want to teach too well, because, if you teach well, then everybody understands and then they get good grades. So if this is the system then, this is how we’re going to have to keep it.
Implications and conclusion
Situated within a sociocultural approach to L2 writing development, this study examined students’ and teachers’ perceptions of ideal and real feedback practices as tools for the socialization of L2 writers. Although the small number of cases in this study makes it impossible to generalize about larger populations of students or instructors, it is hoped that these cases’ unique and more private frames of reference will allow readers to develop what Firestone (1993) has referred to as ‘analytic generalizations.’ These are principles that help to further theorize a topic, in this case highlighting insights and directions for future investigations about the complex variables linked to the success, failure, and impact of feedback practices for second language writing development in content courses.
The findings of this study highlighted students’ perspectives of feedback as a source of advice and dialogue about the writing conventions they struggled to master. Notably, in the context of a content course, feedback represented a chance to engage with instructors in an exchange of ideas, an opportunity students valued as much if not more than the chance to have their texts grammatically corrected. To be heard and to receive the advice needed to join an academic conversation were parts of students’ constructions of ideal feedback. At its best, feedback was something that made the hours of hard work and countless revisions ‘worth it.’ At its worse, minimal and hard to interpret feedback with little substantive responses to their ideas left them [End Page 222] feeling ‘depressed,’ ‘ignored,’ and with little sense of what to do next to improve their writing.
Instructors in this study also affirmed that they wanted to do their best to provide useful advice to their students and that they valued feedback as an opportunity to engage students in dialogue over multiple drafts of a text about their topics and the writing conventions of their disciplines. These findings add weight to the notion that content instructors can see themselves playing a significant role in the academic discourse socialization of L2 writers (Zhu, 2004).
Significantly, however, this role appears to have been hindered by the fact that, in practice, feedback was also constructed by instructors as an onerous and undervalued task in a university setting where ideal feedback practices were, in fact, incompatible with institutional pressures to limit resource expenditures, maximize research productivity, and adhere to strict grade distributions. As a result, despite the best intentions, instructors usually composed feedback quickly and kept their comments brief in order to save the precious time they needed to engage in institutionally valued activities such as research. Instructors also often found themselves giving feedback that was more focused on defending a grade than on developing writing skills. As such, these findings illustrate that what might at first seem like a consensus on goals and aims regarding writing practices and feedback activities could actually mask serious dissonances in their realization.
Paying attention to dissonances
Prior (1995) has emphasized the need to acknowledge the forces that create disparities in how students and instructors construct their experiences of feedback. The insights from this study underscore this point and also reinforce the need to include in textual and pedagogic descriptions of feedback practices the details of the larger institutional forces and practices (such as grade distribution requirements) linked to these writing practices in universities (Goldstein, 2006). Paying closer attention to the ‘dissonances’ between the various contextual layers that surround the literacy experiences of L2 writers (Samraj, 2002), especially within the context of content classes, clearly illustrates how successful interactions between disciplinary experts and newcomers and their ability to discuss discipline-specific writing conventions is governed, not only by pedagogic goals but also by institutional factors which must be addressed if we are to understand how content instructors use feedback practices to address L2 writers’ needs. [End Page 223]
The avenues of research that emerge from these insights include the possibility of exploring more broadly the institutional regulations linked to writing assignments in various universities as a way to explore their relationship with feedback and thus with L2 writers’ academic discourse socialization. For example, future studies might examine policy documents at different institutions combined with interviews or surveys of both content instructors and department heads to produce a more in-depth view of the perceived impact that merit and reward systems and grade distribution practices have on feedback practices. Research might also examine the discourses that surround these policies and how their impact on feedback practices is understood, discussed, and potentially naturalized or resisted by administrators, instructors and students, thus reflecting and reinforcing at a micro level, larger macro level discourses and forces central to the entry and participation of multilingual writers in specific academic communities (Duff, 2007b).
Designing feedback with an institutional perspective
At a more practical level, this study highlights the value of engaging instructors in dialogue about the link between their feedback practices and institutional relationships. Of note is that instructors in this study appeared well aware of those institutional forces that negatively affected how they responded to students’ texts. The larger problem, however, seems to have been a sense of isolation and a perceived lack of interest from the university in changing things. Part of the solution to these problems may lie in creating forums where instructors’ perspectives about feedback practices for L2 writers (and possibly L1 writers as well) might be shared, collected, and discussed so that instructors no longer have to feel they have to make these decisions alone in an unsupported way. More importantly, these forums would allow a more public examination of what too often remain unspoken and private rationales for a crucial strategy with significant consequences for the socialization of L2 writers in their disciplines.
At an institutional level, these forums would provide valuable insights, grounded in instructors’ lived experiences, about those policies which may actually be preventing the successful socialization of increasing numbers of multilingual writers. This might include, for instance, the paradox of departments who benefit from funding resulting from the increased presence of international students, while at the same time finding themselves under pressure to minimize expenditures of the resources that may be necessary to support these very [End Page 224] same students. Conversely, insights about those policies that can actually help promote the socialization of multilingual writers would also surface. This might include, for example, the possibility of rewarding more explicitly the extra time and effort expended by instructors who work with L2 students and fully engage in the process of feedback, engaging in the dialogue and negotiation (including multiple readings of various drafts) necessary for these students to learn to write in their disciplines.
This notion of an institutional as well as a pedagogical design for successful feedback practices offers a more complex vision that places the responsibility for their success or failure on instructors and students as well as on the institution that houses them. At its heart, this responsibility entails asking what the best practices are for giving feedback to L2 writers in content classrooms and determining whether an institution’s requirements, goals, and services align themselves with the conditions needed to allow these practices to actually take place.
If this institutional dimension to feedback practices is not taken into consideration, the risk is that, as with the cases described in this study, we may see students’ and teachers’ best intentions co-opted by goals and pressures that have little to do with L2 writing development. This could lead to a mismatch between the feedback interactions students and teachers desire and what actually occurs. In other words, no matter how good the instructors’ intentions might be, if ideal notions of writing feedback are not supported by the institutional forces that surround these practices, their efforts may well lead to brief, limited, and defensive types of feedback practices, and hence more often to the students’ frustration and misunderstanding than their success.
This is sad news for anyone who views learning as something that best occurs in situations where learners and ‘guides’ can work together productively, particularly in an L2 learning context where interaction and negotiation are considered key to successful socialization into new discourse communities. This seems even more unfortunate when we consider what is potentially lost every time L2 students cannot get the feedback needed to make sure their texts do not remain stuck at the level of incorrect grammar and with their ideas ignored or dismissed. In such cases, students, such as the ones in this study, are often left to figure out alone how to best communicate their ideas. In so doing, we minimize students’ chances to successfully produce the cross-cultural texts that with some help are waiting to be produced and shared, and which are one of the great advantages of the increasing transformation of universities as sites of international and multicultural contact. [End Page 225]
Indeed, this echoes the point boldly made by Kaori, who suggested that ‘international students are the best students’ because of their willingness to sacrifice so much and work so hard, and because of their ability to bring new ideas and perspectives to the classroom. This was certainly true in Kaori’s specific case, and it is one of the reasons I hope to see further explorations of feedback practices within larger institutional contexts so that L2 writers like Kaori receive the feedback they need in order to reach their potential.
Acknowledgment
I would like to thank the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) and the Scott Paper Graduate Fellowship for their financial support of the doctoral research from which this paper is drawn. I am also indebted to Patricia Duff, Sandra Zappa-Hollman, Martin Guardado, and Lyndsay Moffat, as well as to the editors and reviewers of this journal, for their insightful feedback and guidance on earlier drafts of this article. Finally, I am eternally grateful to my research participants for their selfless dedication to this project.
Notes
1. All names used for institutions and individuals in this article are pseudonyms.
2. None of these students came from wealthy backgrounds. On the contrary, issues related to the costs of studying and living abroad were often discussed as a significant source of stress and worry for both the students and their families.
3. When participating in the study, these students would have been in their third year of undergraduate studies in Japan.
4. Sadly, the vast majority of instructors contacted for this study declined to participate. The most common reason for refusal, despite frequent expressions of interest in the study, was a lack of time due to heavy schedules and teaching loads. [End Page 226]
5. Although this was not a campus-wide practice, an examination of publicly available course outlines and departmental documents revealed that references to grade distribution norms could be readily found in undergraduate courses in the faculties of arts, law, science, psychology, computer science, math, and land and food.
References
Appendix A.
Sample student interview questions
1. Please tell me about your experiences with teacher response in the past. How often did you receive responses from your teachers on your written assignments? What kinds of responses would you receive? What role do you feel teacher response played in the classes you took? What role do you feel teacher response played in your writing development until now?
2. What do you think of the different types of responses you received from teachers on your writing? How do they make you feel in general? How do they make you feel about your writing? Is one kind of response (face-to-face, written feedback, etc.) better than others?
3. What kinds of responses do you usually expect/get from your professors?
4. What role do you feel teacher response plays in the classes you are taking now? How important/useful do you feel they are? Why?
5. What did you like about the way that the teacher responded to you? What worked well for you? What did not work well for you? Why? Can you give me a specific example of something that they helped you improve? What do you think makes a difference between more useful and less useful responses?
6. What effect do you feel the teacher response received in this class has had on your writing in the short-term? How do feel it will influence your writing in the long-term? Have the responses [End Page 230] you received from the teacher this class changed in any way your view of writing in this specific area of study? If yes, how?
7. What do you usually do with the responses you receive from your teachers? Do you use the responses in any subsequent writing/ rewriting you do? How?
8. Do you feel your relationship with the teacher is influenced by the responses he or she gives on your writing? How?
9. What did you expect in terms of teacher response when you came into this class? Were there any surprises? Do you ever ask for a specific kind of response? What kinds of responses would you like to have in a perfect world?
10. Do you ever communicate with your teacher to discuss the response they provided you on your writing? Please tell me more about how you do this.
11. What do you think the teachers trying to do when he or she gives you these responses on your writing assignments? What do you think affects the specific kinds of responses your teacher gives?
Appendix B.
Sample university instructor interview questions
1. Could you tell me a little bit about yourself and your experiences here at BMU? Could you tell me a bit about your work here at BMU?
2. Today is a chance to ask you questions about your experiences providing feedback to students on their writing in the classes you teach. Could we begin by telling me a bit about what comes to mind when you think of correcting and providing feedback to students?
3. Could you tell me what comes to mind when you think of providing feedback to students for whom English is not a native language?
4. What are your goals when you provide feedback to students? Why? Would you say that writing development is one of your goals?
5. How important would you say your role as a teacher is when it comes to providing feedback to students on their writing? How important do you feel feedback is for students in content courses?
6. What other purposes if any do you feel feedback on writing may actually have? [End Page 231]
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7. Could you tell me a bit more in detail about the type of feedback that you give . . .
a. What do you usually comment on? What do you usually write on students papers? And why?
b. How do you respond? In writing? Orally? Both? Typed? Etc.
c. Do you have any specific strategies in terms of what you attend to in responding to writing?
d. Are there any specific strategies you use to make the act of responding to students easier, more effective?
8. What effect do you feel or hope that the feedback you provide has on students in general? How confident are you that it helps them develop their writing skills? Why or why not?
9. In a perfect world, what kinds of responses would you feel would be the best/most effective? Why? [End Page 232]
