High school writing teacher feedback on word choice errors

Abstract

This study scrutinizes the range and types of feedback given for word choice errors occurring in the English Taiwan Learner Corpus (ETLC), which contains Taiwanese high school students’ English writings and the corrective feedback provided by L2 writing teachers. All instances of word choice error tags (n = 1,439) were extracted from the ETLC for analyses. Results showed L2 writing teachers provided indirect feedback more often than direct feedback, requiring students to self-correct without guidance. Furthermore, many errors tagged as word choice were grammar errors, further questioning L2 writing teachers’ understanding of word choice errors and competence to correct such errors. This study highlights the importance of raising students’ awareness to targeted lexis prior to completing L2 writing tasks. We also argue that there are benefits for L2 writing teachers to provide focused and direct word choice error feedback after the completion of such tasks.