Exploring the effect of computer-mediated teacher feedback on the writing achievement of Iranian EFL learners: Does motivation count?

ESL/EFL Learners' Responses to Teacher Written Feedback: Reviewing a Recent Decade of Empirical Studies

“…Studies have shown that interventions are very useful when the effect of TWF is investigated, especially efforts to make comparisons between different feedback types (Bitchener andKnoch, 2009a,b, 2010). In the present review, intervention studies using experimental or quasi-experimental designs were also with the examination of the feedback effects, such as the comparisons made between three types of directness forms (i.e., direct speech acts, indirect speech acts, and hedging) (Baker and Bricker, 2010), two feedback modes (i.e., computer-mediated and computergenerated feedback) (Sherafati et al, 2020), three focuses of comprehensive WCF (i.e., accuracy, syntactic complexity, and fluency) (Zhang and Cheng, 2021), and two feedback types (i.e., indirect coded correction feedback with and without short affective teacher comments) (Tang and Liu, 2018). Although these studies and other intervention studies may not take the learners' responses as their main research purposes, the findings related to responses were also important in these reviewed studies.…”

“…A similar preference change between automated feedback and TWF could also be found in this study. In Iranian EFL learners' writing experience, learners either support computer-mediated TWF or computer-generated feedback (Sherafati et al, 2020). In effect, preference was not always extreme and learners also expected to receive the combination of two sources, namely both teacher and peer feedback (Tsao et al, 2017).…”

“…Some learners preferred direct detailed feedback (e.g., direct corrective feedback) (Elwood and Bode, 2014;Niu et al, 2021) and others preferred indirect written feedback (e.g., indirect coded correction feedback or such feedback along with short affective comments) (Kim and Kim, 2017;Tang and Liu, 2018;Mujtaba et al, 2020). Similarly, no definite trend was discovered between the choice of selective (focused) feedback (Ferris et al, 2013) and comprehensive (unfocused) feedback (McMartin-Miller, 2014;Sherafati et al, 2020;Lee et al, 2021;Zhang and Cheng, 2021), but feedback that pointed out learners' L2 writing shortcomings (Pitura, 2021), was informative on the content (Bastola and Hu, 2021) or provided metalinguistic explanations for grammatical and orthographic errors was preferred by a certain number of English language learners. Also, learners seemed to prefer WCF in general as written comments (Ene and Kosobucki, 2016), or with the feature being coded (Han, 2019), or being explicit and overt compared with three other WCF types (underlining, error coded, metalinguistic explanation .…”

Investigating the effect of computer-mediated feedback via an LMS integration in a large-scale Japanese speaking class

“…Compared with CGF, CMF is still labour-intensive (Ashwell & Elam, 2017 ). However, CGF cannot wholly replace CMF in students’ effective error correction (Sherafati et al, 2020 ; Thomson, 2011 ). In L2 writing, CMF significantly improved students’ writing ability on a delayed posttest compared with CGF (Sherafati et al, 2020 ).…”

“…However, CGF cannot wholly replace CMF in students’ effective error correction (Sherafati et al, 2020 ; Thomson, 2011 ). In L2 writing, CMF significantly improved students’ writing ability on a delayed posttest compared with CGF (Sherafati et al, 2020 ). While CMF requires teachers’ manual evaluation, CMF can generate and provide meaningful linguistic feedback covering all categories of morphology, syntax, and pronunciation errors.…”