Arab World English Journal(February 2014) Theses / Dissertation
Name of researcher: Norman Williams
Title of Thesis: Reformulation as Feedback on Students’ Writing
Major: English Language Teaching
University name: The University of Manchester, Faculty of Humanities, School of Education
Degree: M.Ed.
Year of award: 2008
Name of supervisor: Dr. Juup Stelma
Abstract:
The issue of how best to provide L2 writers with feedback on their written output has been the centre of a lively debate for several years. This study, carried out in a government-funded tertiary education institution in the United Arab Emirates, attempts to evaluate the effectiveness of reformulations of learners’ written output followed by teacher-student conferences comparing learners’ original output with these reformulations. While conclusive results are not presented here, this study would seem to indicate that these combined feedback mechanisms may be more effective than metalinguistically coded feedback followed by teacher-student conferences, particularly in the areas of coherence, grammatical range and accuracy and lexical range and accuracy. Implications for classroom practice are presented, along with suggestions for future research.
Key words: feedback on written output, reformulation, error correction, language acquisition, conferencing