Investigating the Effects of Interactional Feedback on EFL Students’ Writings

Providing feedback and its appropriate types on learners’ L2 writing have been a controversial matter for over 20 years where much research has been carried out about various modes of corrective feedback on form. Although recent innovations encouraged teachers to offer feedback on cohesion and organizational structures of the content, very few studies have regarded feedback as an interactional enterprise in EFL classes. Interactional competence seems to be ignored in writing process as if the learners do not indeed have any intended interlocutors in mind. This study hence seeks to discover the possible effects of teachers’ interactional feedback on the learners’ performance and motivation. A group of 20 intermediate learners was randomly divided into experimental and control group. The control group received only corrective feedback on form and organizational structure, whereas the experimental group also received additional comments from the teacher about the ideas involved in the writing, her personal idea about the topic and in some cases request for further elaboration. The study was successful to indicate the positive effect of interactional feedback both on the performance and motivation of the learners with a better teacher-learner rapport witnessed.