Dosing Criticism With Praise: E-Feedback in L2 Student Writing

Abstract

The current study deals with e-feedback delivered to the students in higher education during COVID19 pandemic. The data comes from e-feedback delivered to the students in a departmental compulsory course at the department of English language in a state university. Data analysis is conducted in two stages. First, the e-feedbacks classified into three categories regarding the feedback moves by Hyland and Hyland (2012). In the second stage, the categories coded by the two researchers were transferred to SPSS, with the aim of finding out the frequently employed speech act employed by the instructor while giving e-feedback to students. In addition, chi-square test was also conducted to see whether there are significant differences in speech act groups according to the level of success in the study. The findings indicated that the instructor prefers to give e-feedback to unsuccessful students than successful ones using different groups of speech acts such as praise and criticism. Another finding of the study shows that criticism and praise were the most frequently used feedback patterns in our data while suggestion and other feedback acts did not occur frequently. Overall, the study shows the importance of instructor-based e-feedback for academic writing.