Teacher’s Written Feedback on Students’ Descriptive Text Writing and Their Perceptions Toward the Written Feedback Given in Senior High School

Abstract

Feedback can be viewed as an important process for the improvement of writing skills for students (Hyland, 1990; Hyland & Hyland, 2001). It is now seen as crucial ways for encouraging and consolidating learning for learners as well. This is because feedback beside offering suggestions to facilitate improvement and providing opportunities for interaction between teacher and students also become motivation for the students to foster improvement in mastering English skills (Hyland & Hyland, 2006). Feedback is classified in many types, and each of them has its own specialization. Hyland (2006) divides feedback into several types, they are written feedback, oral and conference feedback, peer conferencing feedback, and computer mediated feedback. Many scholars believe that among those feedbacks, written feedback is the crucial and the most important for the writing improvement. According to Ferris (2002), written feedback is various. Those are content feedback, direct feedback, coded feedback, non-coded feedback and marginal feedback. Feedback is particularly important for students because it lies at the heart of the student’s learning process, but little attention has been given to these problems. Therefore, this study investigated the types of written feedback and students’ perceptions toward the written feedback given, especially in the teaching of descriptive text writing in SMA Negeri Ambulu. This research was a descriptive qualitative study. Mc Millan (1992:144) states that a descriptive study simply describes phenomenon, and the descriptions commonly find in a form of percentage. In this research, the researcher was not intended to establish and prove hypotheses but it was aimed to describe the teachers’ written feedback and the students’ perceptions toward the written feedback given in senior high school especially in SMA Negeri Ambulu. This research used qualitative method because of its relation with the objectives of the research that was to provide detailed types of written feedback and the students’ perceptions toward the written feedback in SMA Negeri Ambulu. The area of the research was SMAN Ambulu which was chosen purposively by the researcher. The participant of the research was the English teacher and the students of X MIPA 4. This class consisted of 36 students. The data collection method in this research were documentation, questionnaire and interview. The documentation was in form of students’ drafts. It was conducted to gain the data dealing with the types of teacher’s written feedback given, while questionnaire was administered in order to gain the data of students’ perceptions toward the written feedback. The interview was done to cross check the information before and after the findings. The results of data analysis showed that the teacher’s used various types of written feedback in her teaching and learning of descriptive writing, but the portion of each feedback was not equal. Direct feedback in the form of surface of the text was the most frequent feedback given by the teacher counted as 55, 9 % followed by coded feedback 14, 3 %, non-coded feedback as much as 11, 8 %, content feedback 10, 9 % and marginal feedback 6, 9 % Thus, in giving the written feedback there was not exact pattern from the teacher, it was given based on the students’ mistakes and needs. In addition, the results of the students’ questionnaires dealing with the teachers’ written feedback given in their descriptive text writing showed the positive perceptions. It means that the students believed the written feedback given by the teacher help them develop their writing ability, especially in descriptive text writing. It is an integral part of the teaching and learning process since it provides many contributions to writing ability.