The English Teacher’s Written Corrective Feedback on the Students’ Writings in Vocational High School

Abstract

Writing has become one of the fundamental skills that must be mastered by the students. There are many strategies to overcome the students’ problems in writing a text. The use of Written Corrective Feedback (WCF) may become one of the strategies to overcome the students’ problems in writing. Teacher’s WCF, namely comments, questions, or error correction given by the teacher in the written form on students’ assignment (Mack, 2009). There are eight types of Teacher’s WCF proposed by Ellis (2008). Those types are: (1) Direct WCF, (2) Indirect WCF, (3) Metalinguistic WCF by Using Error Codes, (4) Metalinguistic WCF by Using Explanation, (5) Focused WCF, (6) Unfocused WCF, (7) Electronic Feedback, (8) Reformulation. This study investigated the types of Teacher’s WCF given by the English teacher to the students’ writing along with the most frequent type of feedback given, the reason of the teacher in applying certain types of WCF, and the contribution of the WCF given by the English teacher for the students. This study used case study as the research design. The data were obtained from documentation and interview. The researcher copied the students’ writing which has received WCF from the teacher and categorized the types of written feedback by using the theory of typology of WCF from Ellis (2008). Then, the researcher did the interview with the English teacher in order to know the reason of the teacher in applying certain types of WCF to the students’ writings. After that, the researcher did interview with the students in order to know the contribution of WCF given by the English teacher. The interview used Indonesian language and was transcribed into English. The results of the interview were analyzed by using thematic analysis proposed by Braun and Clarke (2006). The results of the documentation revealed that the teacher used three types of WCF to the students’ writings. They were Direct WCF, Unfocused WCF, and Electronic Feedback. In addition, Direct WCF was the most frequent type of WCF given to the students’ writings. Based on the results of the interview, the teacher stated that she gave Direct WCF to the students’ writings because this type of WCF was understandable by the students. In providing Direct WCF, the teacher pointed out the students’ errors and directly provided the correct form of the errors. So, the students would not confuse to understand their mistakes that they have made on their writings and revised it. The second type of WCF given by the teacher is Unfocused WCF. The teacher gave correction to all the students’ errors rather than focusing on just one or two types of errors because she wanted to make the students understand about all their errors that they have made although it was time consuming. The teacher also gave Electronic feedback to the students by giving the comments through the website called Google Classroom. It was because the teacher tried to keep giving feedback although they had to do the online teaching and process in order to make the students understand about their mistakes on their writings. Then, the results of the interview with the students revealed that high and medium achieving students stated that WCF from their teacher were beneficial for them in order to avoid the same mistakes in the future while low achieving student tended did not pay attention to the feedback given, therefore low achieving student did not get the benefit of the feedback itself.