Austrian Learner Corpus of Academic Writing

The aim of this pilot study is to examine how error type and feedback type influence the revision process of undergraduate writers. For the purpose of this study, text feedback was provided for eight essays, which were produced in a writing class for students who study English as a foreign language. Directive and non-directive feedback – differentiated by either providing or not providing students with suggestions for improvement – was distributed to an approximately equal extent. The revised texts were then compared to the draft versions in order to analyse the students’ reactions to the feedback instances. Errors which gave rise to feedback were described in terms of the Scope – Substance taxonomy (Sigott, Cesnik, & Dobrić, 2016). In this study, the focus is on Error Substance, i.e. the units of text that need to be modified, namely, text, paragraph, sentence, or word. The focus is on whether feedback is effective at all, and if so, whether there are differences in the effect of directive vs non-directive feedback, and whether the error type that gives rise to the feedback is related to the effectiveness of the feedback. In addition, reasons for non-responses to feedback are investigated.