Effects of Ongoing Feedback on Students' Attitudes towards Writing

The purpose of this study was to investigate the role of ongoing feedback from the professor in students' processes of learning and developing writing skills. Specifically, the researcher was concerned with how ongoing feedback affected students' attitudes towards writing because in EFL contexts, motivating students to write is a first step to engage them in a challenging journey of academic writing. 20 freshmen taking a writing course, "Paragraph & Essay Writing", at A university participated in this study and they were asked to complete the questionnaire at the end of the spring semester 2009. The results revealed that receiving ongoing feedback from the professor had a positive influence on affective domain, was helpful to develop learning strategies, and was valuable in learning outcomes. However, they also expressed negative opinions: feeling a burden, focusing on forms, and feeling confused. To reflect their opinions, the following four suggestions were made to create a more effective learning environment: promoting learner autonomy, facilitating individual writing conferences, giving balanced feedback in between form and content, and using judicious feedback through careful streaming.