Résumé:
This study explored the role of synchronous and asynchronous online teacher feedback in
enhancing students’ writing in terms of complexity of structure. It has been hypothesized that
if students are exposed to online synchronous and/ or asynchronous teacher feedback, their
ability to use complex structures in writing will be improved. To test this hypothesis, an
experiment was conducted with fourteen third year students of English at the department of
English, Mohamed Seddik Benyahia University, Jijel, and a questionnaire was administered to
eight teachers of the Written Expression module at the same university. The results obtained
from the experiment, which consisted in providing online feedback on a students’ writing
task, demonstrated that both types of online feedback helped students to increase slightly the
number and the variety of the complex structures used in their compositions especially the
number of complex sentences, prepositional phrases, relative pronouns, and relative
conjunctions. However, limitations pertinent to the implementation of the experiment
prevented comparing the relative effects of synchronous and asynchronous feedback. On the
other hand, the findings from the teachers’ questionnaire showed that teachers believe that
synchronous online feedback would better improve students’ writing since it allows live
discussion where both the teacher and the students interact with each other and creates an
atmosphere that is, to some extent, similar to traditional classroom feedback. Nonetheless,
teachers preferred to use asynchronous online feedback because it is less time-consuming and
less efforts demanding. The inconclusive results of online feedback highlight the need for
traditional feedback, and the unfamiliarity of both teachers and students with online feedback
calls for more training in the use of technologies in education
