CAF: A Collaborative Approach to Providing Feedback

This paper reports findings from a small-scale study on a collaborative technique for providing feedback to student writing, English languages teachers spend a significant amount of their time and effort on providing feedback to students on their writing performances. However, their corrective feedback does not produce desired outcomes. The students either do not pay attention to the comments or they do not learn as much as expected. Research suggests that they generally regard feedback as punitive. and demoralising. One reason for this is that students are not made a part of the feedback process, rather, only its recipients. Based on these premises, a small-scale action research project was conducted in a reputed Australian university. The study employed a collaborative approach, termed here as Collaborative Approach to Feedback (CAF), in which students, rather than their teachers, in small communities, worked together on their writings to provide feedback to each other. CAF, as an educational practice framework, was adopted in this project to involve students actively and collaboratively to provide feedback to other members of their community. Preliminary findings indicate that students felt engaged in and empowered by the process, and that, CAF as a feedback technique exerted positively on the correction of errors in writing. In the pretext of feedback and error correction theory, this paper offers a collaborative feedback framework and a rationale for CAF to be further explored, developed, and adapted.