Visibilizing invisible engagement behind students’ no-revision operation to written feedback

Student engagement with written feedback (WF) in English as a second language (ESL) / English as a foreign language (EFL) learning has been widely researched from cognitive, affective, and behavioural dimensions. Students’ textual change is taken as the only indication of their behavioural engagement with feedback. Students’ no-revision operation or their unaction is usually considered as their disengagement or lack of engagement, or excluded from the examination of students’ WF engagement. How students have possibly engaged themselves with WF before they consequently disuptake (used in the context of feedback engagement, as an opposite to “uptake”) it is hardly touched upon in most studies. To visibilize students’ invisible engagement, we contextualized the study in a natural EFL writing class involving students’ writing and revisions after peer review and automatic writing evaluation (AWE). We used stimulated recalls and screen capturing to investigate students’ cognitive, affective and behavioural engagement with unactioned WF (hereafter UAWF). The findings show that 95.9% of the UAWF have been attended. The three participants, of different English proficiency levels, reported to have variably engaged themselves with their UAWF. Our findings also reveal feedback quality and students’ experience in using AWE system greatly influences their engagement with AWE feedback; student’s language proficiency has a stake in their engagement effectiveness; carefully designed peer review activities can make peer reviews more effective to benefit both feedback receivers and providers.