The Role of Synchronous and Asynchronous Online Teacher Feedback in Enhancing the Complexity of Structure in Academic Writing

Abstract

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