Rachael Ruegg

Facilitating written feedback on students’ writing

 Date: Saturday, June 22

Time: 2:00 PM – 4:00 PM

Place: Join-us

Room: kenshushitsu 6

Bio: Rachael Ruegg is PhD candidate at Macquarie University and a lecturer at Akita International University. She has been teaching English for over 10 years in New Zealand, Germany, China and Japan. Her research interests include vocabulary, assessment and writing.

Summary: This presentation will give advice to teachers about how best to go about facilitating written feedback on students’ writing. Teachers of writing often wonder when to give feedback, how to give it, how much to give and how often. In addition to this there are different sources of feedback – Should the teacher give feedback on every assignment? How about peer feedback, is it really useful? The presenter conducted research in this area over a period of one year with 71 Japanese students. During the one year period she collected all student writing and the feedback they received. In addition to this, she asked the students to complete questionnaires at the beginning and end of the academic year, received their writing test scores at the beginning and end of the academic year and conducted follow-up interviews with 12 of them after the academic year was over. In this presentation she will use the results of her research to give advice about how to facilitate written feedback on students’ writing taking into account students’ perceptions of feedback they receive, which feedback they notice and use, what they do with that feedback, what leads to improvement in writing ability and the ways in which different feedback affects learner confidence in their writing ability.