EXPLORING THE EFFECTIVENESS OF USING AUDIO-RECORDED FEEDBACK ON STUDENTS' WRITING ASSIGNMENTS (original) (raw)

2020, Fourth Internet Conference Proceedings "FOREIGN LANGUAGE IN PROFESSIONAL TRAINING OF SPECIALISTS: ISSUES AND STRATEGIES"

The value of the ability to write effectively promotes students’ progress through compulsory education to higher education in academic writing in English. At the university level in academic writing, the ability to write in a second language (English) is considered not just as a standardized system of communication but also as an essential skill providing students to study in the faculties which use English as means of instruction as it does in engineering faculty at Muğla Sıtkı Koçman University. Therefore, writing in the academic context and getting feedback on their work has an important role for these students in order to establish their academic goals. However, there is some published evidence stating that written comments on students' work referring to students’ dissatisfaction with academic feedback have been the subject of discussions (Cann, 2015HEFCE,2005). Giving feedback on students' products is a problematic area since students often claim that they get too little, too late and that they sometimes struggle to read or understand it (Rotheram,2009; Weaver,2006 as cited in Morris&Chikwa,2016). Traditional teacher-centered instruction is losing its place in education when today’s students are growing up as digital natives. They are mostly surrounded by digital technology; they read media, send news, get news, draw pictures, play games, and communicate on virtual platforms. Considering these attitudes of digital students towards traditional instruction, traditional feedback forms consisting of handwritten, summative and interlineal feedback (Siva, 2012) are also replaced by digital feedback. One way of giving feedback is the form of digital audio feedback. Mobile devices and collaborative learning environments are becoming common tools in education. There has not been any study testing Read &Write in Google document as a digital audio feedback tool on essay paper in academic writing courses to indicate whether or not it is an effective method for writing informative essays. Thus, to explore the effectiveness of digital audio feedback with the use of Read &Write in Google document as an online audio feedback tool within the context of informative essay writing in the first-year undergraduate engineering students in the academic writing course, a study was designed and carried out. Data gathered from the google form questionnaire shows that students are highly supportive of audio feedback. They explained that they felt the audio feedback helped them to see what they had missed out on their coursework and had more details than written comments so they could improve their written work.