Evaluating the effect of feedback on EFL writing quality and lexical sophistication
| Title in English | Evaluationg the effect of feedback on EFL writing quality and lexical sophistication |
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| Authors | |
| Year of publication | 2020 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Description | Feedback is a very powerful teaching tool, and in order to be effective, it should be timely, specific and multiple (Ferris, 2009). The feedback under investigation was provided to comply with these principles as far as institutional context allowed. This paper aims to present the results of the study investigating the effectiveness of feedback on EFL learners‘ writing quality with regard to lexical sophistication as an important component of writing proficiency. Psycholinguistic properties of words have been of interest to cognitive scientists and recently have been connected to the construct of lexical sophistication. Word properties such as concreteness, familiarity, imageability, meaningfulness, age of acquisition, lexical-decision times and word associations have been used to model writing and lexical proficiency (Crossley&McNamara, 2011; Guo et al., 2013; Kyle et al., 2018). Learners‘ development in these aspects of lexical sophistication might be measured using indices of a freely available natural language processing tool TAALES (Tool for Automatic Analysis of Lexical Sophistication) (Kyle, 2015) which calculates over 300 indices capturing the construct of lexical sophistication. The research design of the study takes the form of a pre-test/post-test quasi-experiment with the treatment in the form of a multiple-feedback provision on subsequent drafts of the same text in a computer-mediated environment where both a teacher and peers were feedback providers. Two learner corpora were collected and analysed using TAALES to explore how the psycholinguistic properties of words contribute to the development of lexical and writing proficiency of EFL learners of English for Specific Purposes. The results indicate improvements with regard to lexical sophistication measured by the indices of psycholinguistic properties of words, and some of these changes are statistically significant. The findings suggest that mostly formative feedback provision might be effective in developing lexical aspects of students‘ writing and peer feedback might be successfully made part of the feedback provision process. |