This study examines the relationship between students’ memories of teacher feedback and these students’ writing and attitudes toward and enjoyment of writing. More than 8,500 survey responses were collected from advanced undergraduate students in a large university writing program. A question about the characteristics of teacher feedback received by student respondents was examined both quantitatively and qualitatively. Second, responses to a different survey question about students’ attitudes toward writing were statistically compared with their reported memories of teacher feedback. Responses to the teacher feedback and writing attitudes questions from different student subgroups (analyzed by first language backgrounds and by when they matriculated at the university) were also compared statistically. Results showed that students had a wide range of reactions, some positive and some negative, to teacher feedback. There also was a strong relationship between their self-reported enjoyment of writing and how they have experienced teacher feedback. Further, it was clear that multilingual students expressed more negative attitudes toward writing in general and reported less positive experiences with teacher feedback. The study suggests that students attend to and have a range of reactions to teacher feedback and that teachers should be self-reflective and sensitive about their response practices, particularly when responding to multilingual students about language issues.

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).

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.”

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.

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.