Teacher’s Feedback on Learners’ English Writing Compositions

This study sought to investigate the progress of students writing skills on teacher’s written corrective feedback. This study followed a qualitative approach, using a descriptive research design. Using Hedge's (1998) theory on written correction indicators, three written essays were obtained via three stages of students' paper essays as the research data. All these received essays were then examined following Hedge’s theory

Volume: 9 Nomor : 2 Bulan : Mei Tahun : 2023 According to Hyland and Hyland (2019), feedback is often seen as one important thing to encourage and consolidate students' learning. Giving feedback is thought of to be one of the strategies in enhancing the integrity and proficiency of students' writing skills (Irfan, 2020;Irwin, 2017;Rodríguez & Mosquera, 2020;Tien, 2021). However, behind the EFL teachers' corrective feedback, many cases were faced themselves. The teachers often encounter many obstacles in providing feedback on student writing. It is because most of today's EFL teachers have little knowledge about precise ways and methods to provide feedback.
Additionally, in the current practice of corrective feedback, teachers tend to be less detailed in giving error corrections. For example, a previous study reported that most teachers rarely gave feedback to students regarding their assignments (Ladsmi, 2018). More bluntly, however, rested upon the authors' personal experiences, teachers in some cases gave verbal and written responses to the students' mistakes without explaining the responses, such as offering correct answers or giving some advice to students. Given this, students find it difficult to solve their problems concerning the errors they committed in their writing. Thus, it contributes a significant impact on their writing quality.
Moreover, the authors also indicate misunderstandings between teachers and students related to the feedback. For example, teachers sometimes highlight students' papers, yet there is no clear communication between the teachers and the students related to the teachers' comments. This sort of problem leads to confusion among the students regarding the mistakes that they have committed. Additionally, such a problem has a significant effect on the inability of students to improve their writing skills, which serves to further triggering a decrease in students' learning motivation.
Some researchers have widely conducted studies on written corrective feedback. In this particular research study, accounts of written corrective feedback reported by Indonesian investigators are set out. The first research was conducted by Dharma and Tari (2017). The study focused on the impact of direct feedback on students' EFL writing skills. They found that direct feedback given through two consecutive written assignments has no significant effect on students' writing quality.
The second study was conducted by Kisnanto (2016), looking at the written corrective feedback effects on writing accuracy of higher education students. Her pre-test post-test writing test study indicated a different impact of written corrective feedback on students' writing accuracy. She found that direct written corrective feedback significantly influences students' writing accuracy, while indirect feedback has no impact.
Faroha, Muslem, and Fajrina conducted the third study in 2016. Faroha at al.'s (2016) study investigated the kinds of written corrective feedback and the motive behind using the feedback types on students' writing. Using the qualitative method in the form of descriptive analysis, they discovered two types of corrective feedback, to name direct and indirect written feedback used by teachers were; the reasons for using those two types of corrective feedback are to respond and correct students' writing errors.
A study on teachers' corrective feedback has also been reported by Rhohmawati (2018). The study focused on describing triple main issues of feedback correction, such as its types, dominances, and functions. Rhohmawati's (2018). Study showed that the teachers used five types of oral corrective feedback and two types of written corrective feedback, including direct and indirect feedback. In terms of functions, Rhohmawati found that students' guidelines, motivation, and interaction development between teacher and studen ts served to be meant for the oral corrective feedback. In contrast, students' writing guidelines, motivation, and aid to analyze errors are the means for written feedback corrections. Rhohmawati also found that explicit correction and direct correction become the dominant types of oral and written feedback corrections, respectively The above previous studies have investigated teachers' written corrective feedback from various foci of interest by looking at its general impact, effect on students' writing accuracy, its kinds, functions, dominant used types, and the reasons behind its use on students writing. This research focuses on teachers' corrective feedback on students' writing, almost similar to these past studies. However, of those presented accounts, the study reported by Dharma and Tari (2017) has a shared interest in this present study. However, it is essential to note that Dharma and Tari's (2017) line of investigation involved only two phases of written assignments derived from students' short essays.
Unlike the study of Dharma and Tari (2017), this study was based on teachers' corrective feedback on students' writing skills progress. In this research, the data were gathered through three stages of written essays. Volume: 9 Nomor : 2 Bulan : Mei Tahun : 2023 With this consideration, the authors argue that this current study presents a thorough but novel analysis of students' writing skills progress on teachers' feedback. The novelty of this study lies in the interpretation raised to the issues of the progress of students writing concerning teachers' corrective feedback. With this in mind, the issues proposed in this current research are worth studying. From the given background, this study intends to address the following formulated research question: "How does the progress of English students' writing compositions after receiving teacher's feedback?"

Method
This research used the qualitative method to find out the students' writing progressed after receiving feedback from the teacher. Qualitative was considered to be the most appropriate means for this study, since following the research aim, this study utilized data in a natural situation and analyzed them descriptively devoid of turning the analysis into statistical procedures.
The data of this research were the feedback corrections given by the teacher towards the students' essays performances. The source of data was obtained from paper essays of three students of third semester studying English in a state university in Gorontalo, Indonesia. By this, documentation has been the data collection technique for this study. Further, the authors analyzed students' work results in their papers related to the feedback and the results of their work. With this in mind, the required data for this research was gathered from a copy of three saved work papers of the students. The written essay generated from these three participants are then labeled as P1, P2, and P3 respectively.
To analyze the research data, the authors employed a triple flow analysis of qualitative enquiry proposed by Miles, Huberman, and Saldaña (2014). The flows models contained three data analysis flows, such as data reduction, data display, and conclusion and verification. In the data reduction stage, the raw data collected from the site or sample are classified and reduced. For this research, data were from three students' essays that included the teacher's feedback. Data that were contained feedback were singled out and categorized, while the non-data, in this case, the sentences that were not contained the teacher's feedback corrections, were remov ed. Finally, the data that has been categorized were further displayed for the analysis.
After condensing the raw data, the data were then processed to be displayed and analyzed. Throughout this stage, all the written corrective feedback from the teacher was displayed and analyzed based on the theory applied in this research. In analyzing the research data, Hedge's (1998) indicator on writing error corrections was used in this research. The indicator consists of 12 written error corrections, such as word form, tenses, missing word, spelling, word order, punctuation, vocabulary, new needed paragraph, not necessary, article, do not understand the idea, and known error. The authors classified the data based on these written corrective indicators proposed by Hedge (1998) during data display.
After analyzing the data, the authors then concluded this research. In this very last stage, the authors to conclude the analysis, made inferences and verification of the data analysis. Throughout this phase, the authors first verified and revised the analysis before coming to the end conclusions.

Result And Discussion
In this section, the authors present the results of the data that have previously been collected from students' exercise books and task sheets where both of which contained feedback from the teacher. These data were assembled from three students' essays written in sequences and had written feedback by the teacher. In addition, these essays were collected from three class meetings, each of which showed the progress of the students' (in this case, participants) writing upon which the lecturer's feedback was based. Based on the indicator is written feedback and taken in conjunction with the thorough discussion of the research data, the analysis of this study was based on Hedge's (1998) indicators on the writing correction. Following presents written correction coined by Hedge (1998). In order for the data to be easily read and interpreted by the readers, the analysis of this present research will be precisely presented according to each participant from whom the data were derived .

Result
Findings of the teacher's corrective feedback on students' English writing are summarized in the following The provided table above illustrates the teacher's feedbacks on three essays performed by participants of this study. As displayed, no significant differences have been indicated in terms of feedback has on students' writing performances.
Moreover, the table above shows that of the twelve correction indicators proposed by Hedge (1998), only ten were found in the data. The table also showed that the teacher most often makes corrections on the indicator of wrong Word Form (WF). It is apparent where from nine essays that have been collected, there are twentysix corrections emerged in this indicator. In contrast to the WF indicator, the Spelling (Sp) indicator serves to be the minor correction found in students' essays, where only three corrections were found in students' essays (P1 and P2).
The data showed that two correction indicators were not found to contain feedback by the teacher. These indicators are in the form of corrections to add or lack additional paragraphs (//) and corrections to errors that students should know (!!). However, reflecting from the table above, each participant showed different performances in the writing skills progress upon which the teacher's feedback is based.
In the data performed by P1, it can be seen that there is no significant difference that occurs in each essay assessed by the teacher. From the findings above, it was found that changes in P1's writing performance occurred only at E3, while it was indicated from E1 that students only got eight corrections where each correction was as follows; three corrections on WF, one correction on "T," three corrections on "^" and one other correction on "Ø." Meanwhile, in E2, there was an increase in the number of corrections from teachers. In this section of the essay, there were also corrections in the new indicators. While at E1, students only got eight corrections, at E2, it is increased significantly to nineteen corrections on six indicators.
However, the progress of the P1's writing performance can be seen in E3, as the data shows a decrease in the correction given by the teacher, although it is not too significant. In total, the correction on E2 was 19, while on E3, it only decreased to 15. However, there was a significant reduction in some of the most frequently Volume: 9 Nomor : 2 Bulan : Mei Tahun : 2023 corrected indicators. For example, the data show seven WR corrections on E2 and then decreas ed to 4. In "Ø," the initial correction of five reduces to one. On the other hand, new corrections appeared at E3 on several previously unseen indicators at E2. For example, data on E2 show no correction at "T," "Sp," and "?" but this correction appears at E3.
The data results above show that P2 performs a significant change in his performance at E1 and E2. Based on the table above, in E1, it was identified that students got twenty-four corrections in eight indicators. While in E2, where only four corrections were found, there was a significant decrease in the correction. Besides, the indicators corrected by the teacher were also reduced from eight to three indicators. In addition, no correction was found at E3, which indicates another reduction in the correction from E2 to E3.
In P3, where the correction found in E1 is only slightly different, the trend is almost the same as in P1, but there is an increase in the correction at E2. On E1, it is apparent that there is only one correction on "Voc." Moreover, there is a significant increase in corrections in E2. It is seen that there are twenty -one corrections in total on seven indicators, including three corrections for "WF" and "T," four corrections for "^," one correction for "P," six corrections for "Voc," and two corrections on "A" and "?" respectively.
In addition, E3 indicates a significant decrease in correction, whereas in E2, twenty -one teacher's corrections from seven indicators were indicated, and this correction has decreased to five in four indicat ors. Thus, this result suggests that there is a positive trend in P3's writing performance. In essence, the three student participants showed different results in the writing performance from the teacher's feedback. In the following section, details on the findings regarding students' writing progress are discussed. Note that the discussions are made based on the presentation of the findings performed by each participant. In other words, the analysis will be in the form of data finding presentations of each participant.

Discussion
This section is particularly data analysis presentation regarding findings on teachers' feedback towards students' writing skills progress. In the sections to follow, interpretations of the research findings regarding the teacher's feedback on the participants' writing skill progress are laid out.
As clearly illustrated in the findings, there are unstable progress on the essays performed by both P1 and P3 as the results of teachers' feedback. The students (P1 and P3) still committed the same mistakes, even some new mistakes, after being given feedback from the teacher. Additionally, the authors also found that P3 and P1 have shown a similar performance on their writing, where on their first essay (E1), the students did not o btain a considerable number of corrections from the teacher. However, in the following essay (E2), students began to obtain more corrective feedback from the teacher, impacting the result of students writing skills progress. However, strikingly different results from those of the P1 and P3, findings pinpointed that there was a significant improvement in the performance of the essays made by P2 as a result of the teacher's feedback.
Take the findings related to the insignificant improvement in the students' essay writing performances brought about the teachers' corrective feedback, the results are in line with the findings reported by Dharma and Tari (2017), where students are still found to make a lot of the same mistakes even after being given direct feedback by the teacher. In the study report, Dharma and Tari (2017) concluded that the feedback provided was less effective in reducing errors made by students.
Regarding the previous explanation, this study of teachers' feedback indicates that each participant showed different performance in students' capability to write English essays. However, behind that justification, looking at the visible result indicates an improvement in students' writing skills after obtaining feedback from the teacher. Furthermore, these results are seen in the entire student's essay, particularly in their third essay. Thus, it is fair to say that the teacher's written feedback has a meaningful impact on students' writing skills progress, despite the result in this study.

Conclusions
This qualitative study of teacher corrective feedback intends to determine the progress of students' writing after getting the teacher's feedback.Tthis study involved nine essays gathered from three participants, where the essays contained written corrective feedback from teachers. Overall, the study revealed some differences in students' English writing skills progress to teacher's essay corrective feedback.

Volume: 9 Nomor : 2 Bulan : Mei Tahun : 2023
This study is expected to be the implication or the reference of teachers in order to see how this method can be used by teachers in achieving learning objectives. Some teachers have used the way to provide feedback in their teaching process, while other teachers still do not realize this as the precise choice on accomplishing their goals. Thus, by looking at the results of this research, it can be an indication of how feedback can be applied on every learning and teaching process, not only in writing courses, but it could be practical on another skills subject such as speaking, listening or reading.