Prompting MEd students to engage with academia and the professional world through feedback

Little research has been conducted on writing-related issues in Master's level postgraduate professional development (PPD) programs. In such contexts lecturers' responses to student writing make a particularly worthwhile subject of research, as they reveal assumptions about valid knowledge surrounding the relationship between academia and the professional world. In this paper we report a study of a corpus of feedback texts gathered in a Master of Education (MEd) program at a university in Hong Kong. Employing a form of combined thematic and enumerative content analysis, we demonstrate how lecturers prompted students to engage with academia and the professional world at the levels of feedback points and of individual feedback texts, and how a host of lemmas prominent at the level of the corpus participated in constructing the two categories of feedback points that performed different feedback acts. In addition to having methodological and pedagogical implications, our study adds to the current literature on feedback research while aiming to inspire more research on academic writing in PPD contexts.