Talking About Writing: Teachers’ Oral Feedback to Elementary Writers

• In Event: Promising Scholarship in Education: Dissertation Fellows and Their Research

Abstract

Teacher feedback can be a critical force in student learning and may be particularly important in helping students learn to write. However, little is known about the oral feedback that teachers provide. When studies have examined teachers’ feedback in writing instruction, most of the work has focused on written feedback to secondary and post-secondary students, often finding that the feedback is unsuccessful. The work conducted on oral feedback has largely focused on writing conferences, extended conversations around a student’s writing, within a single classroom. However, writing conferences are not typical in most classrooms, particularly those with culturally and linguistically diverse students. As such, little is known about the oral feedback teachers provide during writing instruction and how such feedback may support students in learning to write. This qualitative study explores teachers’ oral feedback across six fourth-grade classrooms. Specifically I asked: 1) What kind of oral feedback, in terms of content, nature and quantity, do teachers provide? and, 2) How, if at all, do patterns of teacher feedback relate to changes in student writing on unassisted pre/post writing tasks?

The sample for this study was drawn from 36 video and audio recorded observations (6 per teacher) across argumentative writing instruction in which teachers used a commonly created curricula designed to align with the Common Core State Standards. Data sources also include unassisted pre and post writing assessments for each student. Using a coding scheme developed to capture the content of the feedback and the roles teachers and students played within each interaction, I coded every teacher and student utterance within each feedback interaction. In addition, each interaction was coded for the initiation of the interaction (whether teacher or student initiated), the length of interaction, and the focus of the interaction (e.g., whether the feedback focused on issues related to the writing task, surface-focused issues such as handwriting, or procedural aspects of the task such as reiterating directions). I then looked at patterns within and across classrooms. 25% of the transcripts were coded by another rater, with more than 80% interrater agreement. In addition, two trained raters each scored all of the students’ pre and post writing samples.

Author

• Lorien Chambers Schuldt, Fort Lewis College