Reflection+on+an+article

REFLECTION ON MOTIVATING REVISION OF DRAFTS THROUGH FORMATIVE FEEDBACK This article is written by Hedy McGarrell and Jeff Verbeem and they argue that addressing developing writers’ communicative purposes through an inquiring stance to early drafts motivates revision and thus creates opportunities for writing skills development. It is mentioned that giving deep-level revision has productive effect on writing skill development. They used simple draft compositions and implications to gain the results. Their purpose is to provide EFL and ESL writing teachers who use multi-draft writing in their classrooms with the rationale and strategies for adapting formative feedback. They believe that formative feedback is the most appropriate one to motivate for immediate and substantive revision. By giving formative feedback teachers want to discover intended meanings and develop writers’ willing to communicate. In my opinion, giving just evaluative feedback, which is in the sentence-level errors, may give a chance to take the form of directives for improvement on present or future assignments. However, the formative feedback, which often consists of questions intended to raise awareness of the reader’s understanding of the meaning of the text, may encourage substantial revision on the next draft. When I look at the sample feedbacks I feel as if the evaluative feedback were given by a machine. I am sure that the student will correct the grammatical mistakes and give it back to the teacher without developing its context deeply. So the student will not be able to find a change to develop his writing skill. That’s why I am much more interested in formative feedback. It shows a way to think and force to student creative thinking. I believe that writing skill can develop by thinking and analyzing deeply. As I understand from the article the formative feedback, even if giving formative feedback is a good strategy it has some features that might be taken into consideration. Firstly, while asking questions teacher avoid from ambiguity. Secondly, while teacher emphasis on content and organization s/he uses an inquiring way rather than a directive stance. For example; Instead of ‘use the present tense instead of the past tense here’, formative feedback might ask the writer to reconsider the time sequence used, thus giving the writer an opportunity to negotiate or clarify the intended meaning. Thirdly, formative feedback must be avoided of judging. Lastly, formative feedback is highly personalized and it takes consideration into writers’ confidence, learning process etc. individually. Generally, I can easily say that I agree with using formative feedback helps the student developing in writing process. It pushes the students to think on what they will write as well as how they will write. It does not deal with just form, it also deals with content. As a future teacher I think using this feedback format will give better result in terms of writing skill development. However the teacher as a reader and commenter must be objective and avoid from prejudicing. The attention must be paid while giving feedback on students draft because it will affect the other draft and the entire process of writing. SALİHA ARSLAN