This article examines teacher feedback on student compositions in an Advanced French Composition course at a Research 1 institution. Our study suggests that when teachers combine written corrective feedback with audio comments, their engagement in grading compositions may rise significantly. As teachers bring renewed energy to familiar responding practices, they shift from “grader” to “reader.” These findings have important implications for teacher training and the role of feedback in L2 courses.

Welcome to the second issue of our third year of publication. As the journal has become more established, we are seeing a wide range of fascinating research and teaching work related to response to writing in both first and second language contexts. This issue is no different. In this issue, we present two research articles, two teaching articles, and a book review. In the first piece, “L2 Learners’ Engagement with Direct Written Corrective Feedback in First-Year Composition Courses,” Izabela Uscinski examines how second language learners of English engage with feedback from their college writing teachers. Uscinski draws on Svalberg’s (2009) definition of engagement, suggesting that it “encompasses not only the cognitive realm, but also affective and social.” To better understand how writers make use of written corrective feedback and whether it leads to meta-awareness and noticing of language structures, she recruited eight Chinese-L1 first-year college students taking a stretch composition course at a university in the United States. She asked the students to meet with her when they had received grammar feedback from their teachers and recorded the computer screen as they revised their essays. Playing back the recordings, she then asked the students to discuss what they had done and why.

This study explores student written responses to teacher feedback and analyzes these responses through the framework of critical discourse analysis (CDA). Drawing on CDA, we examined the structural, interactional, and interdiscursive features of 21 students’ paragraph-length comments on formative teacher feedback on their first assignment draft in a first-year composition class and investigated relations between the text, interaction, and context. The structural analysis indicates that the students’ comments demonstrate their emerging academic literacy skills. Our interactional analysis shows that most students took on an active role as a good student and a hardworking writer, but some students exerted their agency by taking the opportunity to resist the authority of the teacher, while others rejected it altogether. Our interdiscursive analysis illustrates that students used not only language from the teacher’s comments, but also metalanguage of the composition classroom to formulate their responses. Based on our findings, we discuss implications for teaching practices and future avenues for research on students’ responses to teacher feedback.

Peer response is one of the most important activities in writing classrooms because it provides a sense of audience to students. At the same time, students also receive feedback for revision. Asking L2 writers to use their L1s in providing feedback to their L1-speaking peers helps them gain confidence in peer response activities, which in turn gives them self-confidence in their writing proficiency. In this small-scale pilot project, L2 students were asked to reflect on their use of L1s providing both oral and written feedback. They reported that students felt they could express their feedback in a more meaningful way. The article concludes with pedagogical implications in teaching writing in both ESL and EFL contexts.

Sustainable feedback practices, that can encourage self-regulation of performance and improvement in future work beyond an immediate task, require our students to be active participants in, and users of, the feedback we provide. Critical to this participation are the internal feedback mechanisms of reflection and self-assessment. They require students to make evaluations about their own writing without the aid of external agents, which in turn can encourage better use of teacher feedback. Moreover, dialogic collaborative feedback that encourages this type of self-evaluation through interactive cover sheets has been featured in existing practitioner research studies. This teaching article presents an extension to the use of such cover sheets to include student self-evaluation and reflection in relation to specific marking criteria as part of an existing feedback cycle on a first-year undergraduate course. Observations from the practitioner research presented here highlight how the inclusion of such rubric criteria not only helped to develop students’ confidence in independently monitoring and evaluating their writing but also heightened awareness of the rhetorical features of their texts.

It’s exciting to already be introducing the first issue of our second volume year of this new journal! We’ve been receiving positive feedback on volume 1 and great contributions for this and upcoming issues. In this issue, we present two research articles and two teaching articles. In the first piece, “Papers are Never Finished, Just Abandoned: The Role of Written Teacher Comments in the Revision Process.” M. Sidury Christiansen and Joel Bloch examine the delicate dynamics occurring between teachers’ written comments and subsequent revisions. Their study follows four students receiving written comments from one teacher over a series of three papers and two revisions per paper. The four students were postgraduate science or engineering students, all international students taking an ESL writing course at a university in the U.S. The teacher feedback took the form of marginal comments using the Microsoft Word® Comments tool as well as an add-on set of macros allowing the teacher to standardize commonly made comments (and customize them as needed).

The debate over the efficacy of written teacher comments has raised a variety of questions for consideration by both researchers and practitioners. Teachers can use written comments, in Vygotsky’s (1978) framework, to scaffold the development of student writing. By reflecting on his or her own commenting process, a teacher can assess and modify his or her comments as well as the method by which the comments are delivered. This study examines how four second-language (L2) students responded to comments on a series of three papers. The results show that students overwhelmingly followed the strategy training given during class on how to respond to teacher’s comments; however, the strategies used to make changes did not always result in a positive revision. While students believed they followed the teacher’s suggestions, they did not always pay attention to the paper as a whole, which resulted in problems with coherence or grammar, and even instances of plagiarism. Results indicate that strategy training does not guarantee an outcome of successful revision. This suggests that revision will be more effective for student paper development if understood as part of the creative process of writing rather than mere error correction. Based on these results, several proposals are made for modifying the comment process.

This article introduces the idea of grammar agreements as a way to offer a more “finely tuned approach” to grammar feedback in the L2 classroom (Ferris, Liu, Sinha, & Senna, p. 307). These agreements offer students options for how the teacher will respond to writing done in their first-year composition classes. The authors offer suggestions for both why grammar agreements are a useful tool in the L2 writing classroom (and possibly beyond) and how to implement grammar agreements effectively.

For decades, researchers and teachers in composition have wrestled with how to respond to student writing. Part of this discussion has focused on what role teachers should assume when reading and responding to texts. From these discussions, different roles have emerged, including the gatekeeper, the critic, the facilitator, the coach, and the judge, among others. While some have argued that the use of response identities helps teachers focus their responses while offering students an audience for their texts, others are more wary of what influence these roles may have on the student-teacher relationship and teacher comments. This article explores the history of response identities, including research on both the positive and negative outcomes from their use. It then offers a new perspective of response as an intellectual endeavor, emphasizing both the labor that goes into response and the rewards that both students and teachers can receive from the process. Ideas of how to move toward this view of response are offered.

This issue completes the second volume year of JRW. It is hard to believe how quickly the two years have gone by, and we are gratified with the excellent work that authors have shared with us and with the positive response from readers. This issue has five papers—two research articles, two teaching articles, and a book review—which notably discuss response topics from a broad range of pedagogical contexts. With the publication of Magda Tigchelaar’s article, “The Impact of Peer Review on Writing Development in French as a Foreign Language,” we are happy to extend our discussions of response to writing to the teaching of languages other than English. Comparing the effects of peer review and self-review over a semester, Tigchelaar found that student writers were more likely to attend to/apply suggestions from their own self-reviews than they were to incorporate suggestions from their peers. She also found that peers were more likely to emphasize global concerns such as organization, and self-reviewers were more interested in fine-tuning at the sentence level and across sentences (cohesion). In particular, the study argues for a meaningful and increased role for guided self-feedback in writing instruction: “Learning how to review one’s own texts may require more time and training, but this initial investment may plant the seeds for more effective development of autonomous writers.”

A substantial body of research has demonstrated the important role of providing feedback in students’ writing development. Among the various feedback methods, the teacher-student writing conference has often been rated by learners as the most beneficial to writing development, but research on English as a Foreign Language (EFL) students’ perceptions of writing conferences is scant. Aiming to investigate students’ experiences and attitudes towards writing conferences, this study collected data through questionnaires and individual interviews with 34 EFL students from 2 college English writing classes. Findings suggested that the students held high expectations and gave high ratings on the helpfulness and success of the conferences that they experienced. Affectively, the questionnaire results indicated a generally positive experience, but the interviews revealed that attending conferences provoked anxiety in some learners. Most significantly, the study found that although students did not openly reject setting and leading the agenda, most were not enthusiastic about taking on the responsibility of establishing the direction of the conference.

In addition to other unfortunate circumstances, teacher response that comes in the form of negative, generic, and unintelligible commentary causes students to become alienated from writing. This problematic response often results from the lack of supportive student-centered response pedagogies within the first-year composition classroom. In an attempt to prevent additional writerly estrangement and to undo students’ isolation from the writing process, this article explores Marshall Rosenberg’s nonviolent communication theory as a potential framework for a dialogic, compassionate writing response pedagogy.

Nancy Sommers’s Responding to Student Writers is a self-proclaimed “modest book” (vii) with an important goal: discussing best practices in responding to student writing. Published by Bedford St. Martin’s, the book aims to address teachers at the college-level who may find themselves struggling with increasing enrollment and a practice that “takes more time, thought, empathy, and energy than any other aspect of teaching writing” (x). At approximately 50 pages, Sommers’s slim book is both conversational and easy to digest, a text that could easily be slipped in a carry-on bag for a trip to a conference or read quickly between classes. Though the retail price for students is $18.99, teachers can request a desk copy for free through Bedford. The majority of the volume is organized into an introduction and six main sections; however, an index, brief bibliography, and summary of best practices are also provided.

Research has shown that in order to facilitate the development of students’ writing, teachers need to cultivate principles of effective feedback. However, revision is a joint process, and for the maximum effectiveness of this process, there should be more than just a giver-receiver relationship with the teacher giving the information and the student receiving it. Instead, students should be actively involved in the revision process by reflecting on and analyzing their own writing and meaningfully responding to teacher feedback. This teaching article describes a technique—Letter to the Reviewer—that facilitates collaboration between the teacher and the student. A Letter to the Reviewer is a memo that students attach to each draft, in which they provide a short reflective note to their reviewer by identifying the strengths and weaknesses of their draft and ask for specific feedback on certain elements of the draft. The technique was implemented in two first-year composition classes for multilingual writers in a large university in the Midwest. Teacher observations of student work and students’ self-reports on this technique demonstrated that the letters helped students approach their own writing more analytically, ask the teacher and peers for focused feedback, engage in the collaborative revision process, provide more specific feedback on their classmates’ writing, prepare for writing conferences, and recognize the connection between classroom instruction and their own writing.

The present study aims to investigate the extent to which L2 learners’ individual differences (field dependency and writing motivation) predict their retention of a teacher’s written corrective feedback (CF) in the short and in the long run. Using Ellis’s (2010) theoretical framework, the study examines the issue from cognitive and affective perspectives. Data was collected from 127 intermediate-level university students through written essays, a field-dependence/independence (FDI) questionnaire, and a writing motivation questionnaire, which were analyzed through t test, ANOVA, and multiple regression. The results reveal that there is a strong relationship between field independence (FI) style and the students’ successful short-term and long-term retention of corrections in the subsequent writings. Writing motivation, however, influences the short-term retention of CF only.