Feedback in Hong Kong secondary writing classrooms: Assessment for learning or assessment of learning?

While much of L2 teacher feedback research has focused on the effectiveness of feedback and its impact on student revision and writing, little has been done to examine teachers’ feedback in the larger classroom context of teaching and learning to ascertain the functions teacher feedback serves from an assessment-for-learning perspective. Using multiple sources of data from 26 secondary teachers’ written feedback to 174 student texts, interviews with six of the teachers and 18 students, the present study investigates the nature of teacher feedback and the functions it serves in the teaching-learning-assessment process in the writing classroom. The findings show that teacher feedback focuses largely on assessing writing summatively, primarily serving the purpose of assessment of learning, rather than assessment for learning – i.e., using feedback as a pedagogical tool for improving the teaching and learning of writing. The study calls for greater attention to the implementation of assessment for learning in the writing classroom, and specifically the use of feedback for formative purposes.