“It’s very well written!”: Revisiting praise in teacher written feedback from the perspective of feedback literacy

Abstract

Informed by the conceptual framework of teacher feedback literacy and drawing upon multiple sources of data, including teacher feedback samples, semi-structured interviews, and stimulated recalls, this case study examined how L2 writing teachers praise students in written feedback and their feedback literacy in giving praise in a Chinese English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) university context. The findings revealed that although praise was commonly used, suggestion and criticism still accounted for a larger percentage of all feedback given. The teachers favored independent praise and performance-oriented praise (i.e. text quality) over concomitant praise, effort-oriented, and ability-oriented praise, and praise was found to facilitate teacher-student dialogic feedback and encourage student autonomy and reciprocity in engaging with teacher feedback. The study identified two profiles of praise-giving practice: “active praise givers,” who communicated with student writers by providing feedback, and “sparse praise givers,” who focused more on working on student texts. Based on the findings, an L2 writing teacher feedback literacy framework in written praise was proposed to delineate the required knowledge, goals, values, and skills for giving written praise to improve student writing.