A Self-Investigation into Thai EFL Writing Instructors’ Perceptions toward Written Feedback on College Students’ Writing Essay Assignment

Abstract

Although the behavior and impacts of instructor reflection in writing classes have been extensively studied over the past few decades, a significant proportion of the work has concentrated on students' attitudes and utilization of all such responses, as opposed to teachers' perspectives, self-assessments, and actual text comments given. Research findings on instructors' attitudes regarding students' written work are far from conclusive. This research gathered data from eight Thai-nationality writing instructors of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) and one hundred and six Thai undergraduate students in order to assess teachers' attitudes toward written comments. In addition, the researcher analyzed instructors' self-evaluations of written feedback and the link between their self-evaluations and whether they even responded to EFL areas. The results revealed that these instructors' self-evaluations of the comments that they claimed they generally supplied and the genuine reflection they delivered on student writing were fairly consistent. The results also reveal that while marking writing drafts, these instructors were far more bothered with local issues, particularly grammatical, and this attention persisted throughout the amendments of the writing. Instructors' predilection for and reliance on grammatical accuracy in their comments may misguide students into prioritizing writing characteristics and then into believing that a zero-blunder essay is a competent and better-quality written work. Remarkably, despite the fact that instructors appeared to dwell on local problems for correction, all favorable comments on essays focused on global features. These instructors had little professional training in evaluating student written assignments, according to the findings of this research.