reflection+of+website+conference

**REFLECTION OF THE WEBSITE CONFERENCE ** I chose Nancy Campbell’s and Jennifer Schumm’s presentation about “student-directed feedback on writing” from IATEFL 2012 GLASGOW website. I chose this presentation because I believe that feedback is very important part of learning and teaching a language. Furthermore; students may learn more things while receiving feedback than listening to a lecture. While receiving a lecture, they can correct their mistakes and they can learn something completely they have not understood before. Therefore; feedbacks given by teachers is very important. In traditional feedback, normally teachers say to students their mistakes directly or sometimes teachers give to students much general feedback and they expect students to select the knowledge they need from their feedback. Therefore; most feedback does not satisfy students’ need. However; student-directed feedback on writing presented by Nancy Campbell and Jennifer Schumm solves this problem. As far as I can understand from their power-point presentation and handouts, students writes their first draft and also writes their questions in margin of the paper or as footnote and endnotes. Later; the teacher gives their feedback according to the questions of the students and asks the students to write their second draft by considering and pay attention to the teacher feedbacks; and this goes on like that until the final draft is finished. The presenter proposes some rationales of student-directed feedback on writing. These are ineffectiveness of ‘traditional’ correction, lack of focus in correction (overcorrection), insight into student’s writing concerns and focus on process rather than product. As I said before, I agree with the presenters about ineffectiveness of ‘traditional’ correction. When we come to second rationale, I also agree with this because most feedbacks in traditional correction do not encourage students to think about their mistakes; rather, teachers correct the mistakes of the students directly, which may cause the same mistakes to repeat again. The third rationale is also much reasonable for me because students write their own questions about which they want to get feedback from their teachers; so their questions reflect their concerns about their writings and writing skills naturally and mostly. As for the last rationale “focus on process rather than product”, it shows that the most important part of writing a essay or paragraph in a target language is to be able to learn the usage of the target language correctly. Therefore; the aim of giving feedback on writing is not producing a masterpiece. The aim is to help students learn and use the target language more properly. Therefore; the focus of the feedback is on the process rather than product. Lastly, when we look at the students’ reaction to this approach, we can see that it gets pretty positive reaction. Some reactions of the students to whom the teachers apply this approach are “improved student teacher communication”, “increased awareness”, “personalized feedback” and “more detailed teacher feedback”. I also agree with these reactions. Firstly, student and teacher communicate about more true points. Secondly, students think through their writings and analyze it in terms of textual competence; vocabulary and expression; grammar; and mechanics of writings while writing their questions in order to get a feedback. In turn, teachers have to give personalized and more detailed feedback to these questions including personal writing concerns.
 * Sinem ATEŞ / 1734557 **