 Hi, everyone. Good morning. Thanks, Sherrys. Thanks to everyone for getting up early and getting over here for me. And thank you to the organisers for inviting me. It's great to go to a conference that you don't have to spend eight hours on an aeroplane first. Felly, MTR, Rusyaoedd, mae'r llams yn ymddangos, ac yn ymddangos yn ymddangos ymddangos i'r llwyddiadau. Felly, rydyn ni'n dweud o gweithio ac ymddangos o'r ffaith ac ymddangos o'r ffaith. Ffeedback is probably one of the hottest topics in English language teaching. For those of us here who teach EAP, you'll know that it's been a big issue in the literature. It's because of its potentially powerful influence on learning and achievement. Research shows that it ranks just below direct instruction and cognitive abilities of the student in determining successful learning. It's highly valued by students and it gives teachers the kind of opportunity for individualised instruction that's really possible under normal classroom circumstances. Feedback can provide scaffolded support for learners by encouraging disciplinary understandings, intellectual development and writing improvement. It offers an outsider's view, a reader's view of the writer's work. It gives students a sense of what readers find important in writing, what they value in writing. It contributes to the acquisition of disciplinary subject matter, argument patterns and subject knowledge. Equally though, there's a massive evidence that questions its effectiveness and large-scale surveys in the UK, Australia and Hong Kong show a great deal of student dissatisfaction and frustration with feedback. In our own field of EAP, the literature seems to have got bogged down in an inconclusive dispute around the effectiveness of error correction and a focus on improving writing, which is understood as the current text. But at university, students are not learning to write nor are they learning to write for purposes in some abstractly academic way. They're writing for purposes which lay outside the English class. So the writing that matters for students to their GPA occurs in disciplinary subject courses. So in other words, writing is a tool that they need to participate in their disciplines and to demonstrate their learning in those disciplines. We haven't really always understood that and I think research has mainly looked at feedback in writing classrooms and the feedback given by writing teachers. I want to step outside this circle and look at the demands that disciplinary writing makes on students. What it is that they do in their subject courses and the demands it makes on them. I hope that looking at what does writing mean to faculty and what is the reason they give feedback. What are they trying to do with their feedback and what does the feedback mean to students? How do they understand it? What messages do they take from it? So I hope that a better understanding of what discipline teachers look for in setting assignments and giving feedback and how students understand that feedback can improve our understanding of writing more generally and how we can best help our students to write the kind of text that disciplinary teachers expect. First though, a word about writing in the disciplines. I think in a lot of English classes, a lot of EAP classes, students write essays. On the outside of the English class, they do a lot of different kinds of writing. So a large scale study looking at undergraduate assignments in UK universities conducted by Nessian Gardner a couple of years ago found that students wrote in what they call genre families. There are 13 different genre families ranging from literature surveys through empathy writing to research reports. These different genres differ in their genre structure, in their connection to networks of genres and in their social purposes. So these are not random genres. They reflect the kinds of disciplinary demands which differ across disciplines. And we can see this even in highly cognate genres, highly cognate disciplines. So looking at the assignments given to nursing and midwifery students, so the last two columns there, we can see that there's very little overlap in the kinds of writing that students are asked to do. So this diversity can present students with considerable challenges in the writing, particularly if they're only taught how to write essays and particularly if they are doing interdisciplinary courses. All this really evokes a distinction made by Machon a little while ago between learning to write, where students are learning to express themselves in writing, trying to convey their ideas themselves, and writing to learn, where they're writing to develop their expertise in the disciplinary knowledge and the content of a discipline. So writing to learn sees writing as a tool for learning, both disciplinary content and the appropriate way to talk about that content. It reminds us that learners have to think their way into the discipline through writing. So professors set writing tasks to initiate students into these ways of talking about the discipline and the ways of thinking about disciplinary content. Can you hear me? So the study looks at the attitudes of writing and feedback practices of 20 academics, five from each of four faculties comprising eight disciplines. About half of these teachers were Cantonese L1 speakers and the rest were native English speakers. We also interviewed 24 students from the same disciplines and looked at 100 assignments that they'd written and the feedback on those. Some basic background, Hong Kong U, of course, is an English medium university. Most of the students there attended Chinese medium secondary schools and they come in with middling to good proficiency of English. I was interested then in how, first of all, how the professors, how the tutors saw feedback and writing. All teachers set writing assignments generally for assessment and often as the only form of assessment. But this is not just a measure of quality control. A lot of the tutors were setting writing tasks to develop skills of disciplinary argument and several respondents recognised writing as a key aspect of disciplinary acculturation. So a history professor said, writing is absolutely key, it embodies the discipline, the main discipline product. Teaching history is about teaching students to write. What I expect them to gain ultimately as well as the ability to express themselves is to engage more effectively with discourses in the past. You can't do that unless you can articulate precisely what the discourse means. So writing is central for this history professor and also a business interviewee. I think writing is very important. It reflects the way students structure and express their thoughts. So I'm less concerned about correct spelling and grammar. What I'm very concerned about is teaching them to write logical essays which take a research question and address it in a structured and thoughtful way with evidence and logical conclusions. So interestingly this concern with the rhetorical features of disciplinary writing reflects current practice I think in English language teaching in universities which is less concerned with an emphasis on grammar and more on rhetorical argument. Now the fact that students were writing in a second language didn't seem to be very important. Treated as a minor issue. This is an engineering teacher. If they have problems with language errors that means they're not working hard enough. They're 21 years old. They should have a high level of ability already, not just what they have learnt since coming here. When I assess their writing I have to treat everybody equally so grade grammar less a very small percentage. And a biology teacher. Their language is not good. Everyone's aware of that. I think the big problem is that many students think to write scientific English. They need to use very long words, very complex sentences. I always tell them to keep it simple. So good advice I think. Instead of blaming the students L2 backgrounds, tutors were more likely to refer to students lack of experience in the genre. So they tended to blame the secondary school teachers for not equipping students. So a biology teacher said, I found when students start the course it's shocking. Organising, making a clear argument is weak. Most of them haven't experienced writing or reading reports in high school. And an English teacher. It's nothing to do with not speaking English as a first language. My American students also have trouble. We're just asking them to write in a way they haven't seen before. So tutors expect that students will learn the conventions of their discipline along with the conventions of writing in the discipline. So moving to feedback. What do they give feedback on? Well despite the fact that many EAP teachers believe that faculty are only interested in the content of students' writing. This was mentioned far less than we might suspect. Many teachers, faculty members saw that language is not just grammar but carries disciplinary meanings. And this is reflected on the comments on their papers. This table looks at the main points of feedback on 100 assignments. And it shows that language was mentioned quite a lot. About a third of all the comments on the papers were about language. And when you add argument into that it's the bulk of the comments. Particularly in the business and history, the softer end of the curriculum. Faculty in the humanities and social sciences then offer more explicit commentary on language. This is some feedback on a history paper. My edit here is a classic example of the clarity that can be achieved if you adopt a subject verb object sentence structure. Check your original and see how this expresses your meaning more clearly. So a clear understanding by this historian about what good writing should look like. A business feedback on a business paper said, Avoid long sentences before you have control over sentence structure. Use a single sentence for each point. This will allow readers to see your argument better. So these comments were largely seen as aspects of disciplinary writing rather than just getting the grammar right. An English teacher for example said, My feedback focuses on trying to help them clearly state a claim or idea and then how they can develop it in an appropriate style. So it's about encouraging clarity of thought and clearly defining a question to discuss. A biology teacher, I give feedback for two things to make them think about their experiment. They never think of all the steps. Second to get them to write this in a proper manner. Primarily I'm dealing with the science but I'm also trying to deal with their English. They must go through the whole process from the logic of the model, the hypothesis, the analysis and the discussion and that requires a certain English standard as well. So presenting ideas logically in ways approved by the discipline was a common thread in these interviews. So synchness, getting to the point, not waffling was a major, was often mentioned in this regard. An economics tutor, content is important of course but I want them to get to the point. What do they want to say? What's the key thing? You write for a reason, not because you want to fill ten pages. It's not very concise. That's the problem, not concise at all. A physics teacher similarly, I'm looking for a good logical framework, good scientific principles. This means producing work that's concise, precise, develops good arguments. It should also bring something which shows scientific thinking. So expressing scientific and disciplinary ideas in ways which are valued by the discipline. So overall these faculty teachers wanted students to develop an understanding of both ideational and rhetorical principles. We can see this here and a biology teacher said the biggest challenge for us with feedback is to point out why their writing doesn't make sense even if it presents the right information. They can't think in the right way. So thinking and writing are very, very closely related in the minds of these tutors. Now not all respondents gave feedback and many texts just contain texts, question marks or a grade. Tutors in Arts and Business said that they often spent up to an hour marking each paper. They followed it up with written comments with spoken tutorials. So an English tutor said I write comments in their papers and take examples to put up on the visualiser as part of the lecture. Then I walk them through. I show them examples of good and bad ones. We talk about the organisation and the writing. The students seem to like this and we get plenty of questions. So an attempt to develop the students writing abilities through the content. An economics tutor, if they ask for feedback I ask them to come and see me because I can sit down and ask them what they think. It's easier to explain things verbally and show them the piece of work and say look here you can see this and this. What should be in it and how things link up. So these tutors recognise that their feedback might be more effective if they also allow for face-to-face interaction. So this kind of dialogue I think is familiar to most DAP teachers. It's based on Vygotsky and concepts of scaffolding and how dialogue with a more knowledgeable person can help scaffold and structure learning. This allows tutors to clarify comments far more and it recognises I think more that students are working in a second language. Now several tutors also said that they organise peer response groups both to relieve themselves of marking loads and to provide students with additional learning experiences. So the peer groups business studies tutor said this year students are giving feedback to one another. In my company law class I created a class blog and the writing assignment for that was that they had to write a post to each other each week responding to the group member who wrote the essay. So everybody wrote a paper and got nine responses from their classmates. So it's an ongoing class discussion online and a history teacher. I asked them to do peer reading because by critiquing other people's work they also learn to critique their own. It's always easier to see problems in the work of other people and hopefully they learn to read their own work in a more critical way. This reflects a paper I read that came out a couple of years ago called It's Better to Give Than to Receive which was an experimental paper where one group received feedback but didn't give it and the other gave feedback and didn't receive it. At the end of the semester the group getting the biggest gains were those giving the feedback. So the learning that takes place in giving feedback can be quite a significant part in proving the understandings of writing. Other tutors gave no feedback at all. This engineering teacher said I don't ask for a draft. Their report is an assignment and they're graded on this. So if we give them a chance to write a draft, if we correct a draft, we're just giving a grade to our own work. We don't write their exams so why should we write their reports? So an interesting take on feedback. In many science courses of course the tutor, the professor provides no systematic. There's no systematic mechanism for feedback. In fact students are directed to the teaching assistants. So this is a biologist. Students have access to postgraduate demonstrators. I think it's the students initiative whether they use them and it's obvious they are the ones which do much better. I think they obviously had some input and a chemistry teacher. They go to the postgraduates first and then to me if necessary. If the students send them their drafts then the demonstrator will give them feedback. But this isn't compulsory. It's up to them. Now undergraduates really resented this. This is not popular at all. They felt that the tutors weren't doing their job properly. The whole issue is exacerbated by the fact that the TAs are actually mainland postgraduate students whose ability to write scientifically in English was not much better than the undergraduates themselves. So they weren't really learning very much from the feedback. So what to faculty think about it? Well almost all respondents acknowledged the importance of writing to students. They varied in how effective they thought the feedback was. For some especially in the sciences setting assignments was a way of seeing if students had understood the course. Feedback have very doubtful significance. So a biologist said it's not very helpful especially if it's approaching the end of the course. They care about the grade. So when something is done they don't care about it anymore. They just forget they ever did it. And an engineer. I don't think it makes a lot of difference to be honest. It all depends on the students. Some students will come and talk about it and will go away and change it. Some students seem not to care too much. I guess if the students thought it was helpful the feedback more of them would ask for it. Now interestingly the science and engineering assignments contained about half the feedback points for those in the arts and business. And the feedback was often just ticks or a question mark or just a grade. So the text seemed very hurriedly checked rather than carefully read. Several respondents didn't see improving students disciplinary literacy as their job at all. An engineer said how helpful is the written feedback for improving students' work? I don't teach them how to write. They go to academic writing classes I think and should get ideas about writing from the readings we give them. I don't think the feedback I give would help them to write. And a historian I think that it's hard to see the effects within the semester because this is not a writing course. We're not here to teach writing. Even for us it took years to learn how to write. So feedback is widely seen as important but it's something which needs time and many respondents mentioned that time was in very short supply. A business studies tutor, I don't think many teachers give feedback. Not because they don't want to but they just overworked in the business faculty. We have a huge teacher-student ratio. We can't give quality feedback to every single student in a class of 200. In fact, feedback and even teaching itself involves compromises with other demands on busy academics. In fact, this history teacher represents quite a few of the statements I got in the interviews. We shouldn't fool ourselves. This is a research university where the expectations are quite clear. Research is at the top, teaching is number two, administration is number three. Some of us sometimes feel that administrative work is number two and teaching is at the very bottom. We don't have as much time to help students as we would like. So I think there's an element of realism there. Looking at student perceptions, as I say interviewed 20-something students and from the same disciplines, and these teacher attitudes carry through to students. The feedback that they give or they don't give influenced the way that students come to see their field of study, their progress and themselves. In the second part of the paper, I want to look at what students take away from the feedback, what messages does the feedback give them. So I'm interested in not the intention of the feedback, but how it's understood. Most importantly, feedback doesn't just carry messages about explicitly the content or the way that it's done. It carries information which is given off in Goffman's terms rather than given. So implicit in the feedback are messages or the ways that students understand that feedback. So I'm interested in how students interpret their feedback rather than the intention. Here, we interviewed 24 students again from the same faculties. 22 of these were local Hong Kong students and a couple of mainlanders, and we analysed it using InViva. Looking at the data, we found that there are five main messages that students took from the feedback. The importance of language accuracy in writing, the role of writing in disciplinary communication, the role of writing in learning, the value of feedback in developing their knowledge, and the nature of the teacher-student relationship. We quickly look at each of these. Hong Kong students arrive at university with very clear ideas about language, which are shaped by years of schooling, which emphasise language accuracy. So they expect that they want their text to be grammatically accurate, and they have a good grammatical knowledge, I think generally, of Hong Kong students. It also means that they understand text as the application of rules, rather than the expression of meanings. These certainties are challenged when they get to university by the mixed messages in their feedback. The feedback they get from their EAP teachers reinforces the importance of good grammar. A history student said, I like my writing to be grammatically accurate, so if she tells me something new about my grammar, maybe I'm making mistakes all the time. If she picks it out for me, it means I can get rid of it, because it's really bad to make a mistake and not know it's a mistake. Some students are very appreciative of the feedback from the EAP, but many students find their subject teachers focus on what they have written about, rather than the way they've written it. By ignoring language errors, it perhaps signals more tolerance of error. So a civil engineering student, English courses have comments on language, but civil engineering courses did not. The professors would not give us feedback on this. They would give us feedback like the units, abbreviations, calculations and so on. A business student, I think the subject tutor usually expects your language is okay, and they just concern about your data, or is your evidence convincing. They usually do not say too much about the language, but of course if you can write more beautifully, it's better. So this message that students take from this is it's okay to make mistakes as long as they can discuss the facts correctly. Now I think this is a useful remedy to this kind of obsession with grammatical accuracy, but it risks delinking the importance of academic writing to the discipline. It removes the fact that the discourse of the discipline is integral to the discipline. So students can no longer see this connection. So language courses come to be seen as a way of polishing up grammar. So when they go to the AP classes, they get a very different idea about what writing is from what they, when they go to their faculties. So the role of, how they see the role of writing in the discipline, now because literacy in the discipline means understanding how meanings are conventionally constructed in a discipline. Some students however get the message that their teachers believe writing is less important than reproducing facts. So in a psychology student said there are seldom feedback from the course lecturers because even if they had any feedback, they would focus on the answer to the question and not the way we've written it. The language is not right or wrong. And this is a computer science student. I think for the essays related to my computer science major I did not worry too much because what I've written is related to the technical knowledge. I can easily do it. I can finish the task by copy and paste. I write up the assignment without thinking. So certainly there's less of a sense of the importance of appropriate disciplinary conventions in the writing. So by giving very little advice on their assignments subject tutors convey the idea that writing is kind of straightforward and its conventions are self-evident. So these views were common among science students but similar message were picked up from those studying social and applied disciplines. So if you have an admin student, no advice on writing, even if I ask, I think he won't teach me much. I write it out by myself by looking at the previous reports and then put in the content. I believe he doesn't think it's difficult to write. So that's not a bad method. A business student, no help about how to write. I think we're supposed to know what they want and write like that. So students get the idea that the writing they are asked to do at university is an extension of the kind of everyday English that they bring with them from school or from home, making it much harder for them to understand the complex ways in which discourse is situated in the disciplines. The role of writing in learning tutors feedback practices then also convey messages about what part writing has to play. Potentially feedback can develop their writing and what they learn from writing about the discipline. This is largely confined to English classes, though. This is a history student. In the English class, the tutor tried to help us work on the draft, but then for other courses, not much. One history course, the professor tried to help us. We can send the draft. He looked at the points and we can discuss it with him. But for most courses, they don't have drafts. And a science student. For my English course, we write a first draft and the teacher will give feedback on it. By the time we get on the final draft, I'm usually satisfied. But for the biochem course, you just hand in the final version. I'm more apprehensive about it. What's how is it going to turn out? So the absence of feedback, the absence of a feedback revision cycle seems to encourage you that students have nothing to learn from feedback or from their writing assignments. This is what two students said, a biology student. There's no need to submit a draft. Firstly, the workload will be heavier. Secondly, when we write essay, we only search for some information from the books and internet and then put them into the essay. I think it will be more efficient to write it out once. So what's to learn? An electrical engineering student. No, not really satisfied with it. Usually it's kind of last minute. I don't really take a lot of time to write it or correct it. So it's not really organized very nicely. So for many students, the absence of any focus on writing suggests that writing is just a means of assessment rather than part of a learning experience. Learning disciplinary forms of argument. This is made worse by long delays in getting the feedback. This is from a social admin student. Usually there's not any discussion about the essay because it's a final essay. We don't see the professor anymore. We just get it back after the semester. A business student, we hand in the assignment in May and then it's the summer holiday. You get a grade at the end when the GPA is released. The essay and look at the grade. That's all. So students feel that subject teachers see their writing as a final product rather than as an opportunity for learning. A fourth message that students seem to take from their experiences of feedback concerns how it might contribute to learning itself. Some students are accustomed to getting all their written errors corrected. So at secondary school, they get the case in their language classes. And they come to believe that language feedback is important. So this sociology student, they give feedback to improve because writing is important. You just hand in all your words, your ideas in an essay. So it's important for you to know what your weakness is and help you to improve one essay by one essay or another. A politics student, feedback sometimes may be inspired to think from another way on an essay. So that the content will be better. The organisation will be better and that would improve my skills. So the interviews, however, showed students believe feedback could be more helpful on their subject assignments. Biologists, I think the feedback is so-so for the lab report. We usually ignore the comments. They're not useful. When I got my feedback from my subject teacher, I'm happy that I get a high grade. But also we all feel confused because he doesn't give feedback and I don't know what he likes in my essay or what he dislikes. So another quote from a biology student. I seldom repeat feedback from the teachers. Usually they just give us the grade. Sometimes they may underline the mistakes and they seldom write down anything for it. There is nothing they give us to improve. Just show the mistakes. So it's hard for students to learn anything from this feedback. Feedback doesn't help learning at all. Instead, they get the idea that feedback has very little value. I don't think the teacher has much to tell us in feedback. From the feedback I get, I can't really think what the teachers want us to learn. Chemistry teachers don't give comments. In psychology, you only get the comments after your grade has come out. Sometimes the comment may be, oh, this is good, but they don't tell me what I'm missing. So obviously getting an assignment back with just a grade or one word end comment has very little educational value. This summative approach implies that work is an end in itself rather than the means to acquire a more specialised competence. This is an extract from one of the interviews of the researcher. What kind of comment do the subject teachers give you? Just give us a grade. Are there any comments at the end? No. Only the grade? Yes, that's science. So the message here, that feedback really isn't terribly important. Finally, embedded in tutors' feedback is messages about inequalities and about the nature of the teacher-student relationship. Effective feedback recognises that a writer, the feedback responds to a writer rather than the text. The students said that they welcomed this individual attention. It was very important for many of them. A history student said, the English teacher said she will spend four-each student to talk about the comments after the class. I think this is a good idea. It's a big help to me with the essay. It also helps the teacher to know about my weaknesses and to know about me. The history teacher doesn't do this. And a English student, if the teacher gives you many feedbacks, you will feel very touched that they care about you as a student. I read it and make corrections and remember it. It's a pleasure for me. It's telling the students a lot about how the teacher feels about them and the kind of teacher-student relationship. Many students, however, are discouraged by the messages they get about a relationship from poor feedback practices. Providing a bare grade, saying the return of feedback, minimal marking, failing to discuss comments with them, suggests that their teachers really feel it's not worth interacting with them, that they're aloof and uninterested. Business student, my business tutor just give me one line comment usually and doesn't care. We have too many to care about us. And a biology student, the demonstrators mark the essay. I know the professor very well. So students see their teachers of busy people and often these feedback practices convey a strong message that the students occupy a relatively low place in their priorities. A physics student. She did say that we can find her if we have any problems or the questions about the marking. But often I have a clashing class with the consultation hour. Sorry, I don't feel happy about it. And a sociology student, I sometimes contact them by email but not about the feedback. Usually they are too busy to talk about the essay. They have research to do. So the writing comes to be seen as an assessment tool rather than as a learning experience. Overall these interviews suggest that faculty teachers want students to demonstrate their acculturation into a discipline and their competence in writing. Some of them saw that feedback could encourage this. Very few of the tutors in the interviews mentioned language accuracy. So despite the obsessive interest in error correction in second language learning for the last 20 years it's only of marginal importance when students are writing to learn. Faculty teachers are more concerned about that students can produce disciplinary appropriate texts rather than whether they can write accurately. The students themselves seem to read the feedback in different ways where it's seen as timely individualized and focused it conveys encouragement and support a sense that the feedback is important to their learning. But where it's perfunctury, delayed and unhelpful it sends very negative message to students about their learning. Obviously the interests of faculty and EAP teachers are different. And these different perspectives about writing I think might be usually explored by reaching out and trying to see how we can help each other. It might be helpful if we talk to our colleagues in the faculties to get a better understanding of our students' writing needs and their experiences outside the English class. But for the moment this is my advice. Thank you.