Abstract:
Learners are often reported not to be motivated enough to attend to teacher feedback. Teachers also tend to grade learners’ writing samples when providing them with corrective feedback though they know it may divert their attention away from teacher feedback. However, not grading learner writings does not seem to be an option due to both learners’ demands for it and institutional regulations that require teachers to have summative evaluation. In order to overcome such contradictions, a new technique called Draft-Specific Scoring (DSS) was devised in order to use grading as a motivating, rather than demotivating, device in order to encourage learners to attend to teacher feedback and apply it to their first drafts to improve the quality of their writing accordingly. DSS is a grading system in which learners can improve their received grade by applying teacher feedback to their writing samples in order to improve its quality. The score they receive will improve as a result of the improvement in the quality of the revisions they make. They have two opportunities to go through this procedure. Their final score will be the mean score of all the grades they receive in their last drafts submitted. This experimental study was an attempt to check the effect of the use of this technique in error feedback provision on three measures of fluency, grammatical complexity, and accuracy. The results showed that DSS could help learners improve in all three measures while the control group receiving only error feedback without DSS could only improve in fluency.
Machine summary:
"Unlike Truscott, Ferris believes that, if not all, many students can improve their writing as a result of appropriate teacher feedback, so instead of abandoning such a practice, she believes that we should make our corrections more effective.
He also emphasizes the role of factors such as instruction, tasks, and grades in affecting learners’ success: If corrective feedback recognizes interest in the content of tasks, which are within the students’ capabilities, is supportive and constructive, while rewarding improvement, reflected in the grading system, the conditions might be propitious for improvement… If teacher response emphasizes the defects (in red), shows a lack of interest for the content and offers criticism, reinforced by negative grades based on errors, the circumstances are hardly beneficial for improvement…Any grading system for L2 writing, probably needs to reward improvement, both in terms of content and new language use, together with complexity/accuracy, and in terms of reducing recurrent errors.
2. Does the grammatical complexity of texts written by learners change over the course of instruction as a result of using DSS when providing teacher corrective feedback?
3. Does the accuracy of texts written by learners change over the course of instruction as a result of using DSS when providing teacher corrective feedback?
16 Discussion In the present study, as an attempt to find a solution to the long-lasting problems grading and even corrective feedback were said to cause, it was tried to examine the effect of Draft-Specific Scoring on the fluency, grammatical complexity, and accuracy of the texts learners write."