Korean English Learners’ Incorporation of Native and Nonnative English Teacher Feedback

This study investigates how native and nonnative English teachers give feedback to the 13 Korean EFL college students’ writing. The purpose of the study is to examine how these students incorporate or discard teacher feedback in their revision. In the fall of 2015, over the period of 16 weeks, the students wrote 10 essays, received teacher feedback from NESTs and NNESTs and revised their drafts using both teacher feedback. The findings indicated that both groups of teachers demonstrated comparable ways of giving feedback to student writing. While teachers were cautious in giving content feedback avoiding teacher appropriation, they marked every error they saw on their students’ writing. The findings of student incorporation and survey responses indicated that students appreciate teacher feedback. The students were able to incorporate corrective feedback in a higher degree than teacher commentaries. When the students’ incorporation rates were compared, the students were able to incorporate NEST feedback with higher degrees. The current research also found that the specificity of the feedback determined the success of the incorporation. Korean college students made the most frequent errors in the areas of sentence structure, fragment, word choice, punctuation and singular/plural. These are where Korean students need pedagogical help the most from their English writing teachers to communicate more effectively in writing. Further, this study found that students showed preference toward certain types of feedback for what they were, not because it was given by an NEST or NNEST. Based on the results obtained in this study, implications for EFL writing teachers were discussed in the areas of giving more effective feedback.