The role of peer correction and teacher feedback in the improvement of writing skills in high school students

Abstract

Abstract: Learning how to write appropriately in a new language is a dynamic process in which feedback is a controversial variable. This study involved 30 second-year baccalaureate students from a private high school in Latacunga, Ecuador, and intends to identify how well teacher feedback and peer correction minimize morphological, syntactic, and semantic errors, including the participants' perceptions. Previous studies have suggested that feedback plays a pivotal role when improving writing skills; however, there isnot a substantial body of research that involve explicitly Spanish learning environments. Within the guidelines of a mixed research approach, data from different paragraphs were organized using Politzer and Ramírez's taxonomy and then analyzed in SPSS. The results suggest that feedback produces a relevant effect on writing skills and 93.3% of the students prefer teacher feedback. Likewise, the teacher detected 514 errors, of which 56.61% correspond to syntactic inconsistencies. Conversely, students identified 135 errors, and 58.52% fell into semantics. The findings indicate that teachers and students emphasize different areas when detecting errors and that students still conceive the teacher as the principal source of feedback.