Evaluating the effect of feedback on EFL writing quality and lexical sophistication

Result code in IS VaVaI

<a href="https://www.isvavai.cz/riv?ss=detail&h=RIV%2F00216224%3A14640%2F20%3A00118210" target="_blank" >RIV/00216224:14640/20:00118210 - isvavai.cz</a>

Result on the web

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DOI - Digital Object Identifier

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Result language

angličtina

Original language name

Evaluating the effect of feedback on EFL writing quality and lexical sophistication

Original language 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&amp;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.

Czech name

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Czech description

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Type

O - Miscellaneous

CEP classification

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OECD FORD branch

50300 - Education

Project

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Continuities

I - Institucionalni podpora na dlouhodoby koncepcni rozvoj vyzkumne organizace

Publication year

2020

Confidentiality

S - Úplné a pravdivé údaje o projektu nepodléhají ochraně podle zvláštních právních předpisů