Analysis of Teacher-written Corrective Feedback in Second Language Writing Pedagogy in Secondary Schools, Bulilima, Zimbabwe

Abstract

This study investigated the teachers’ practice on written corrective feedback as well as the students’ response to it in a bid to find practical solutions to the problem of low performance in English composition writing at “O” Level in Zimbabwe. The study sought to find out the nature of corrective feedback that “O” Level students get from their composition teachers and how these students respond to it. In this qualitative research, seven informants (“O” Level students) were interviewed; the researchers used a semi-structured interview schedule to address them and their English exercise books were also analyzed using a document analysis guide designed by the researchers. The study concluded that the composition teacher marked the compositions thoroughly highlighting most of the errors for students’ benefit. The teacher’s focus on feedback was in line with the syllabus demands. The teacher also satisfied the Feed Up, Feed Back and the Feed Forward types of effective feedback. She had strength on mark allocation which acted as student guide to their stance in composition writing. However, although the students largely benefited from the teacher’s corrective written feedback as well as the oral feedback, some of them failed to get the maximum benefit because they could not understand the correction codes. It is therefore imperative for composition teachers to provide students with a correction code elaboration whenever using a marking correction code.