ERROR CORRECTION AND STUDENTS’ PERCEPTION ON TEACHER WRITTEN FEEDBACK: AN EXPLORATORY STUDY ON L2 LEARNERS IN A MALAYSIAN UNIVERSITY

Responding to learners’ writing is a highly time-consuming effort. Such feedback may however be the most significant component to the learners in improving their writing. This paper gives an insight to the complexity in the teaching of L2 writing including the various issues to be decided upon by the writing teacher on what would work best for their students. The research reported in this paper is based on a project to explore the techniques of teacher written feedback and look for ways on how to synthesize the various techniques. The synthesis of the various techniques was then applied in a process-oriented writing classroom to investigate its usefulness based on the students’ perception. Participants in the study were engineering students in Universiti Teknologi PETRONAS (UTP) registered for Technical and Professional Writing (TPW) course. A total of 69 students took part in the study on a voluntary basis. A set of questionnaires were administered to the participants to determine the usefulness of such synthesis. The findings indicate usefulness of the teacher written feedback techniques administered in the study.