Interpersonal aspects of response: Constructing and interpreting teacher written feedback

Abstract

As a pedagogical genre, teacher written feedback is designed to carry a heavy informational load, offering commentary on the form and content of a text to encourage students to develop their writing and consolidate their learning. The information offers the assistance of an expert, guiding the learner through the “zone of proximal development” (Vygotsky, 1978) and providing opportunities for students to see how others respond to their work and to learn from these responses. Feedback plays a pedagogical role by pointing forward to other texts students will write, assisting students to work out the text's potential and to comprehend the writing context, and providing a sense of audience and an understanding of the expectations of the communities they are writing for. The substantial comments that many teachers write on student papers thus do more than simply justify a grade. They provide a reader reaction and offer targeted instruction. Often, however, written feedback has been seen as purely informational, a means of channeling reactions and advice to facilitate improvements. Response is therefore discussed as if it were an objective, impersonal, and purely didactic discourse – simply an interaction between a teacher and a text. But, although the information in feedback is a key factor in learning to write, it is effective only if it engages with the writer and gives him or her a sense that it is a response to a person rather than to a script.