The Master’s thesis aims to examine feedback, more specifically written corrective feedback, as well as its role and use among higher education teachers of Italian as a foreign language.
In the theoretical part, we identify lessons that are crucial to understanding feedback as a communication process. We describe feedback in pedagogical discourse and present types of feedback, among which in particular written corrective feedback, which is used to correct written errors. Finally, we focus on different types of written corrective feedback and thus present indirect, direct, and metalinguistic written corrective feedback through the views of different professionals. We focus on the usefulness of the aforementioned written feedback, by pointing out their merits and drawbacks, and also highlight the pressing topic of the reasonableness of correcting grammatical errors, which is underlined by Truscott (1996) in his scientific work.
In the empirical part, we provide the findings obtained through an analysis of the interviews. We find that feedback plays a key role in the education process in the field of foreign language teaching. Italian higher education teachers who participated in our study provide feedback in various ways, most often opting for oral feedback or combining it with written feedback. We also find that teachers are to some extent familiar with the correction of writing errors with a symbol or code/label system, and some of these systems are also partially used. Most often, they use a combination of indirect, direct, and metalinguistic feedback in all forms of error correction.
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