In this project, I investigated student perceptions of dynamic written corrective feedback (DWCF), a specific method of providing accuracy feedback, in developmental writing classes for multilingual students. Via a quasi-experimental design using treatment and control sections of a developmental writing program’s three levels, I collected and contrasted survey data from a total of 145 students. I then interviewed three students (one international and two generation 1.5) representing a range of perceptions of DWCF. Participants generally appreciated and valued DWCF, especially as a complement to a grammar textbook, and students of classes that used DWCF reported higher scores on most survey items, such as quality of grammar feedback and general class instruction. I also present students’ pedagogical suggestions for better integration of DWCF in writing classes.

This article reports on a study focused on understanding the relationship between teachers’ emotional responses and the larger contextual factors that shape response practices. Drawing from response and emotion scholarship, this article proposes affective tensions as a way for understanding the tug and pull that teachers experience between what they feel they should do (mostly driven from a pedagogical perspective) and what they are expected to do (mostly driven by an institutional perspective) in a contextual moment. The case study of Kim, a community college instructor, offers an analysis of two affective tensions that emerged from her think-aloud protocol (TAP): responding to grammar/sentence errors over content and responding critically to students she likes. Kim’s case reveals the underlying affective tensions between individual emotions, cultural constructions, and institutional contexts that are negotiated while she responds to student writing. This article concludes with suggestions for identifying emotions and affective tensions that both influence and paralyze writing teachers’ response practices.

Online peer review has been increasingly implemented in composition and second language classes. This article reports on a pedagogical practice in which students used the Turnitin PeerMark tool to conduct peer response in a first-year writing class. In this study, students drew on multiple PeerMark functions (i.e., commenting tools, composition marks, and PeerMark questions) and provided feedback on their peers’ summary and response papers. In addition to students’ positive attitude toward the use of PeerMark revealed in the interviews, analyses of archived PeerMark records suggest that students provided constructive feedback in multiple aspects and that the majority of peer comments were later incorporated into students’ revisions through different ways. This report expects to encourage teachers to implement peer review using Turnitin in their classrooms and further explore the role of technologies for peer feedback.

Welcome to the first issue of the third volume year of the Journal of Response to Writing. We are very encouraged by the positive response from readers to our previous issues and are excited to share several excellent contributions in this collection. Before introducing those articles, we want to also welcome you to our first issue published under new editorship. Dana Ferris has rejoined the general editorial board while Grant Eckstein and Betsy Gilliland have been appointed as the new coeditors of the journal.

Substantive and ongoing critique of the quality of one’s writing is necessary if students are to experience writing as a recursive process. However, students’ willingness to critique their texts and those of others is dependent upon the creation of a trusting and mutually supportive learning environment. Using the naturalistic setting of an elementary school writing classroom, attention is drawn to the ways in which two teachers nurtured competence and communication trust (Reina & Reina, 2006) between themselves and students, and among students. Consideration is also paid to teachers’ creation and use of public and private spaces to promote interactions that helped writers revise and recraft substantive aspects of their writing in an ongoing and iterative manner.

This qualitative study reports on teachers’ (formative) feedback practices in writing instruction. Observations and interviews were used to collect data from 10 upper-secondary school teachers of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) writing classes in Norway. The findings indicate that while the teachers attempt to comply with the requirements of the national curriculum regarding formative assessment, and acknowledge the pivotal role of feedback in that pedagogy, the dominant tendency is still to deliver feedback to a finished text. As such, there is limited use of feedback for that text and no resubmission of the text for new assessment, while feedforward is reduced to the correction of language mistakes, which does not foster writing development except for language accuracy. The limited use of formative feedback suggests the need for more systematic professional development of the teachers.

Studies that have reported delayed positive effects for written corrective feedback (WCF) have typically targeted the use of articles for first- and subsequent- mention functions, using narrowly focused corrections that lack ecological validity. Not much is known about how different grammatical features react to mid-focused and unfocused WCF options, which enjoy more ecological validity. This study investigates the delayed effect of different types of WCF on English as a foreign language (EFL) learners’ accurate use of three features of English grammar (articles, infinitive, and unreal conditional). Four groups of participants (N = 77) were treated with different feedback options (mid-focused corrections, unfocused corrections, unfocused corrections plus revision, and no corrective feedback). WCF did not produce lasting accuracy gains, nor did it help corrected students outperform uncorrected students on a delayed posttest.

The rapid increase in online learning programs has led to an increase in the number of students taking composition courses online. As a result, there is a need to develop teaching practices and approaches to feedback designed specifically for online learning environments, which serve a largely nontraditional student population. Addressing a current gap in the literature regarding approaches to feedback that meet the needs of nontraditional students, this quasi-experimental study used a process model of composition and post-positivist and social constructivist epistemological orientations to measure student perceptions and preferences when provided with text-only feedback or a combination of textual and audio-visual commentary. Results indicate that the majority of students, if given the choice, prefer a combination of audio-visual and text-based commentary to textual feedback alone because they consider it helpful and feel that it enhances their overall understanding of instructor feedback by providing more detail and by using auditory and visual modes of communication. Students also liked audio-visual feedback because they considered it a form of personalized and individualized interaction, and some felt that it helped them spend more time and effort on revision.

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.

This study explores students’ response to direct written corrective feedback (WCF) in first-year composition courses. To that end, it focuses on analyzing students’ engagement with direct feedback and meta-awareness of the corrections provided on one of their drafts. Data include students’ revisions recorded with screen-capture software and the video-stimulated recall, which was transcribed and coded for evidence of engagement and meta-awareness. The findings of the study indicate that students’ engagement and meta-awareness may be affected by pedagogical factors, such as feedback delivery method. Based on the insights gained from this study, the author suggests that direct feedback may be more beneficial if it is provided in a comment or in the margin of the paper, and that the student may have a higher potential for learning if a brief explanation about the nature of the error is included. In addition, students may need to be provided with guidelines on how to engage with their instructors’ feedback. The author concludes by suggesting that if direct WCF is provided, students should be held accountable for learning from the feedback, and the author recommends ways in which this can be done without penalizing students for not showing immediate improvements on subsequent writing projects.

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.

Written corrective feedback (WCF) has been increasingly attracting researchers in second language acquisition (SLA) as well as second language (L2) writing practitioners. Bitchener and Storch, two renowned WCF researchers, define WCF as “a written response to a linguistic error that has been made in the writing of a text by an L2 learner” (p. 1). This increasing interest in WCF is understandable because the implementation of WCF is time-consuming as well as pedagogically imperative. However, it is widely known that learners keep making the same error, and thus teachers’ efforts do not pay off easily. Therefore, with the increasing number of published research, it is beneficial to review studies about WCF to synthesize findings and identify issues to guide future research. To this end, Written Corrective Feedback for L2 Development comprehensively reviews WCF studies, especially those conducted under cognitive and sociocultural perspectives, the two major driving forces in this domain.

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.

Metacognition is a typical learning outcome in composition courses, but providing feedback on low-stakes reflective writing and assessing highstakes reflective writing are complex tasks that warrant more attention in the literature. Consequently, this article explores how the assignment of and response to low-stakes reflective writing can provide effective scaffolding to higher-stakes reflective writing tasks. We present an example of our strategy for response through one instructor’s experience with responding to her first-year composition student’s low-stakes reflective writing. Ultimately, we call for more research on responding to reflective writing that will ensure the valid and reliable assessment of metacognition in composition courses.

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.”

The present study investigates learners’ participation in the activities of providing self and peer review in the context of a foreign language classroom to determine which feedback type contributes to greater gains in writing development. The study also investigates whether there are target areas of improvement that are more accessible to self-assessment compared with aspects that are better identified from an outsider’s perspective. Three intact classes of intermediate-level French learners (n = 44) were assigned to one of three conditions: peer review, self-review, and a no-review comparison group. Each group produced four texts over the course of the semester in the following ways: the peer review and self-review groups wrote drafts, provided reviews, and revised their drafts, while the comparison group completed each assignment in one draft. The texts were coded and scored by two raters to determine whether any groups improved significantly over the course of the semester, whether the revisions showed improvements over the drafts, what effect the feedback had on the final text, and which aspects the feedback targeted. Results indicate that none of the groups improved their scores significantly over time, but both treatment groups provided feedback resulting in improved scores. The peer group gave more feedback that was ignored or not useful, while self-reviewers gave more comments that resulted in positive changes. The peer group provided more organization-focused comments and compliments, while the self group focused more on structure and cohesion. Results are discussed in terms of autonomy (Benson, 2001), perspectives on writing development (Manchón, 2012), and foreign language writing instruction.

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.

This study presents a piloted second language (L2) writing tutor (L2WT) internship program as a way to provide supplemental, sustained writing fellow- style support to L2 writers and classroom teachers in multilingual firstyear composition (FYC) courses in a large U.S. university within the span of one semester. The major facet of the internship program was the tutors’ response to student writing in a one-to-one context for each major essay assignment. The presence and needs of second language writing students in the writing classroom have been clearly articulated in relevant research, but what is less known is how to devise successful methods of support that are both helpful and economical. The author provides evidence that students in L2WT-mediated classes earned higher grades and that the L2WT internship program was perceived as valuable for all parties involved: L2 writers, L2 writing teachers, and the tutors themselves. Additionally, the for-credit internship is a cost-effective option for writing programs without the funding to implement a large-scale writing fellows program. Implications for future offerings of the fellow-style internship, as well as suggestions for how to implement this program in additional contexts, are provided.

“English can be both amusing and treacherous,” notes Ben Rafoth, coeditor of ESL Writers: A Guide for Writing Center Tutors. Together with coeditor Shanti Bruce and dozens of other English, composition, and English as a Second Language (ESL) teachers and academics, this book presents the enjoyment and obstacles that tutors and tutees face. The 16 chapters cover a variety of ESL students: international, Generation 1.5, graduates of U.S. high schools, and professionals. In addition, this guide “also discusses differences in tutoring styles in various settings—for instance, with undergrads, peers, grad students, and instructors— as well as variations” also lays out differences in tutoring styles in various settings by undergrads, peers, grad students, and instructors, as well as variations in writing centers across the United States and at foreign universities

This article presents three case studies that closely examine various types of interactions taking place in writing center tutorials involving newly arrived pre-matriculated ESL writers. By learning what strategies tutors commonly use and how successfully the ESL writers negotiate their goals for the visit and the form and meaning of their text through this sample, this study aims to help identify what characterizes successful tutorials and what unique challenges English language learners might face when interacting with tutors. Results from these case studies show that it is not how many corrections tutors make or suggest for the students’ papers, but how much the tutors engage their tutees in a meaningful dialogue that brings satisfaction to the ESL students. Findings also suggest that deliberate efforts should be made to equip ESL writers with necessary metalanguage to communicate their goals for their visit.

Faculty and writing center tutors bring expertise to writing as practice and process. Yet at many institutions, the two groups work in relative isolation, missing opportunities to learn from each other. In this article, I describe a faculty development initiative in a multidisciplinary writing program that brings together new faculty and experienced undergraduate tutors to workshop instructors’ comments on first-year writing. The purpose of these workshops is to assist faculty in crafting inquiry-driven written responses that pave the way for collaborative faculty-student conferences. By bringing together scholarly conversations on tutor expertise and the role of faculty comments in student learning, I argue for the value of extending partnerships between writing centers and programs. Such accounts are important to the field for challenging what Grutsch McKinney (2013) calls the “writing center grand narrative,” which limits the scope of writing center work by imagining centers primarily as “comfortable, iconoclastic places where all students go to get one-to-one tutoring on their writing” to the exclusion of lived realities (p. 3). In this case, I describe a writing center where tutors bring their expertise outside the center and into the faculty office, consulting in small groups with faculty with the aim of enriching the quality of instructor feedback in first-year seminars.

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.

Welcome to the second issue of the Journal of Response to Writing! We are delighted with the warm response to this new journal and to our first issue, of which we are very proud. Thanks again to the authors who shared their work with us and to our Editorial Advisory Board.

This study addresses several challenges in written corrective feedback (WCF) research. First, scholars have expressed concerns that although studies of focused WCF may benefit some classrooms and may help advance second language acquisition theory, they may not represent ecologically valid methods where comprehensive feedback may be more appropriate. Second, many focused WCF studies only report on learner performance within a narrow list of linguistic features, making it impossible for others to determine any secondary benefits or detriments of the treatment. Finally, many research studies of WCF have been of limited duration, making it difficult to identify longer-term effects of various WCF methods. Therefore, this study is an attempt to address these issues by examining the effects of dynamic WCF over a 30-week period. In addition to analyzing linguistic accuracy, this study examined the effects of dynamic WCF on rhetorical appropriateness, fluency, complexity, and vocabulary development over a 30- week period. While improvements in linguistic accuracy were observed for the treatment group when compared to a control group, no other differences were found. Implications for pedagogy and future research are discussed.

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.

In an effort to rethink the evaluation of student writing with the ultimate goal of convincing novice writers that rewriting predicates as well as presupposes the act of writing, I describe a point-accrual grading system where students accumulate points with redrafted submissions during a semester. This approach to evaluation offers students more autonomy in controlling their “earned” grade as well as incentivizes their investments in the revision process. In contrast to the normative percentages approach to grading, this point-accrual system not only gives students a less ambivalent form of grading but also moves them past surface-level revision and into rhetorical restructuring.

Peer Pressure, Peer Power: Theory and Practice in Peer Review and Response for the Writing Classroom ($38.00 in paperback; 296 pages) compiles research and theory articles from a wide assortment of scholars interested in peer review, an area of research that, according to the editors, is woefully underdeveloped, despite being “a ubiquitous feature of the composition classroom” (Lawson Ching, p. 15). As such, this book provides valuable insights into theories and research-based pedagogical suggestions to increase the effectiveness of peer review in various contexts. With the aim of keeping this review concise, I will not address each article featured in this book, and will cite individual articles only by author name with the page number for direct quotes. This in no way is intended to act as a slight toward those chapters that aren’t included; each chapter contributes to the larger discourse in meaningful ways and warrants attention.

My own interest in launching this journal arose in the spring of 2012 when I taught a new doctoral seminar on response to student writing. I had a very bright and engaged group of students who, for the major assignments in the course, reviewed the existing literature and made research proposals related to their own interests around the broad topic of response. Their topics and ideas were fascinating and on the cutting edge, but there was a problem: In several instances, there was little (or no) recent research for them to review.

In a conversation with an editor of the Journal of Second Language Writing, the question was asked, “What is the most popular topic of submitted manuscripts to the Journal?” The response was as decisive as it was quick, “That’s easy. Feedback or response to writing is by far the most commonly submitted topic.” That brief exchange triggered a number of questions that needed answers. First and foremost among those questions is, if response to writing is such a popular topic, might there be a need within our profession for another venue for such scholarship? Though the Journal of Second Language Writing is extraordinary at disseminating the highest quality research on broad aspects of second language writing, space within its pages is limited. Therefore, we determined to investigate whether there is indeed a need for another venue for quality scholarship on response to writing for international dissemination.

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.