Students’ Voice on Feedback and Instructions in Academic Writing

Abstract

Although studies on the approaches and methods of teaching Academic Writing in university classroom are extensive, comparative studies on students’ evaluation of the classroom strategies and techniques applied are still scant. A current paper is based on our comparative research conducted both at Slovak and Hungarian universities at the faculty of Humanities. The objective of this particular study was to explore senior university students’ “voice” on feedback and instructions in EFL academic writing classroom. It suggests that the pinpoint is on the students’ viewpoint rather than their supervisors’. Therefore, our task was to scrutinize the students’ perspectives and based on them develop further research. Observably, the analysed data furnish more positive students’ responses (within both Group A-Slovak and Group B-Hungarian) on feedback, as well as on being graded and being recognised as a writer. However, grading might be an issue in EFL classroom: based on the research, it awakes heterogeneous opinions of the respondents. The final section of the questionnaire was aimed at finding out how instructions for writing during studies can be improved. It is notable that both groups (A and B) (from 66,67% to 100%) consider feedback, professional tutoring, online support and extra courses in writing as an effective tool for improving writing skills within academic curriculum. A logical follow-up of the study might be investigating most appropriate and “customer-friendly” ways of feedback and instruction. This might further instigate creating resources to support the unfolding of academic writing feedback across EFL program Europe-wide.