Praise in Written Feedback: How L2 Writers Perceive and Value Praise

Praise in Written Feedback: How L2 Writers Perceive and Value Praise Karla Coca Department of Linguistics, BYU Master of Arts ESL writing teachers face the challenge of providing written feedback that is both effective and motivating to students. Thus, many end up making use of praise (or positive feedback) before offering criticism. Past research, however, has not put enough emphasis in how students receive praise. In fact, Hyland and Hyland’s (2001) article is one of the few and most recent works to focus on praise above other types of feedback. Yet, they have not accounted for the possibility of different types of praise as Kamins and Dweck (1999) have suggested. In our study, two types of praise (person and performance) have been considered as well as cultural background and L2 proficiency. An original survey was developed in order to analyze these three variants and understand how L2 learners perceive and attribute value to praise in written feedback. A total of 106 participants rated six different samples of praise based on how clear, helpful, valuable, encouraging to revision, kind, and motivating the comment of praise is. In the conclusion, praise type seems to be the most significant variant as participants showed preference to performance over person praise.