EFL Business Writing Behaviors in Differing Feedback Environments

Abstract

To understand students' reaction to feedback, path analysis was used to generate models of student writing activity. Three groups received differing combinations of feedback and redrafting opportunity over four assignments. A total of 563 first drafts from 141 students were analyzed, resulting in 5,630 data points for modeling. Results suggest that Taiwan business English writingstudents may implement proofreading and self‐directed redrafting behaviors aimed towards improving their writing when objective sentence‐level error feedback is supplied with no opportunity for further correction. The addition of redrafting opportunity resulted in generally unproductive writing strategies but also lower objective error rates. Students receiving general teacher‐based feedback exhibited redrafting behaviors and a tendency to copy directly from reference material.