A study of how students feed from feedback : An application of speech act and attribution theory within the field of linguistics

Abstract: This essay provides an analysis of five examples of written feedback on a speech assignment completed for an English as a foreign language (EFL) class by second-year students of upper secondary school. The essay aims to shed light on how feedback is formulated and how it is interpreted as a part of a textual dialogue between teacher and student. The analysis focuses on three separate sources of data: an interview with the students, examples of feedback and a short teacher interview. This dataset provides an insight to the process of the students’ reception and interpretation of the feedback and allows an analysis of the correspondence between what the teacher tries to communicate and what the students in their turn understand from the feedback. Two theories applied in this research include 1) attribution theory and 2) speech act theory, which attempt to show how the students reflect on their achievements and apply feedback to their own development. The feedback is interpreted on two different occasions. First, the textual feedback was coded, and an analysis model was developed based on two characteristics of in-text feedback: directive and expressive functions. The findings suggest that more specific feedback should be provided, and a deeper awareness among teachers of how students interpret their feedback would aid the students’ learning process.