Abstract:

Students' engagement plays a pivotal role in how they respond to teacher’s written feedback on their writings. Despite the ubiquity of prior research on teacher’s corrective feedback in EFL writing classrooms, university students' engagement with the teacher's written corrective feedback (WCF) in tertiary writing classrooms receives scanty attention in the literature of second and foreign language writing. To fill this gap, this classroom case study aims to explore how 25 undergraduate students from an Indonesian university experience and engage with the teacher's WCF on their writings. Data were collected from the documentation of the students' essays, semi-structured interviews, and teacher-student conferences. Empirical evidence showed that the participants found the teachers' WCF helpful. Most of the students felt positively engaged since they received explicitly direct corrections or assistance from the teacher. They preferred the direct WCF because this strategy helped them correct their mistakes in micro writing skills, such as errors in articles, word choice and singular/plural forms, sentence structure, and fragments. However, it was found that negative engagement emerged when the teacher provided the indirect WCF to fix the students' macro writing issues, including unclear main ideas, disconnected ideas, lack of logical sequencing and development of the topic. It mainly resulted from poor English proficiency, less writing experiences, negative beliefs, and attitudes of the students towards the corrective feedback. This suggests that teachers should enact different ways of providing meaningful indirect corrective feedback on students’ writings. 

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