Chapter 7 Actual Experiences of the Technical Communication course for Engineering
7.4 Feedback as a form of representation
From a socio-cultural perspective of learning, the university is considered a social space (Boughey, 2010). Within this social space, students and their lecturers/tutors and administrators converge. In this study, I was interested in the student–tutor discursive space. The most salient manifestation of this space is feedback, which I am convinced can promote or hinder the development of an academic literacy.
Feedback also represents the actual reality, in the sense that it is an actual discourse event at the level of context of situation and context of culture (Lillis and Grainger, 1998). The academic literacies approach attempts to capture both these dimensions by considering feedback as both a discursive and a social practice (Lea and Street, 2000; 1998). Drawing on the literature on representation (see Fairclough, 1992; Hall, 1996), I believe that when tutors provide feedback to students, not only
do they represent their views about writing, but in the types of feedback they provide they also indicate their perceptions of students. In other words, the comments are a reaction to the way students represent themselves and their knowledge.
Consequently, the relative agency behind these comments cannot be taken for granted because they are also an important index of the discursive space that exists between students and their tutors. Lea and Street (1998) suggest that different interpretations of student writing
[a]re constituted both in the linguistic form of the texts – the written texts and the accompanying feedback- and in the social interactions that exist around them- the relationships of power and authority between tutor and student.
In view of this situatedness, they further contend that feedback should be regarded as a specific genre. In this study, two forms of feedback commentaries were initially considered: the comments on the feedback sheets and the in-text comments.
Analysis of the comments on the feedback sheets indicated, however, that they were encoded under the specific tiers (content, structure and language); which meant that tutors had no choice but to comment on these. Because these comments were used principally to justify marks awarded for each section they were mainly evaluative and summative. Furthermore they were inserted on the final draft that was not given back to the students, though there was room for script viewing. A further complication with this data set was that not all the reports had written comments on the feedback sheets. Comments on the feedback sheets were therefore disregarded for the purposes of this analysis and it was in the end only the in-text comments that constituted the corpora. In total, 490 feedback commentaries were considered. As a genre, this feedback is considered only in the context in which it occurs (i.e., the Technical Communication Course).
The first step in the analysis of these feedback commentaries was to draw criteria from the structure of the Technical Communication course. As stated earlier, the course follows a four-tiered approach which consists of the design/experiment element, the structure of technical reports, and technical or style aspects such as referencing and the language/grammar component. Consequently, I examined the extent to which commentaries focused on these tiers. Figure 7-6 presents a quantitative analysis of the feedback commentaries that were found.
Figure 7-6 Types of feedback
Comments classified as stylistic were those which focused on presentation of academic language and would include subcategories such as punctuation, lexis, syntax, voice, register and general grammar elements such as tenses or use of articles. In the same category, I also included technical aspects of writing such as referencing, citation and presentation (for example page numbering and spacing).
With regard to structure, the focus was on comments related to the structure or organisation of the technical report as a whole as well as the organisation of individual sentences and paragraphs. For content, I considered comments that were focused on the objectives of the assignments. Initially, I assumed that these comments would be basically evaluative comments which denoted strengths and weaknesses of the assignments in terms of presented information. Figure 7-7 below shows this was not so as other characteristics of the comments emerged. Of the 490 in-text comments shown in Figure 7-6, 273 (56%) were concerned with style, 182 (37%) were content-related, while a smaller proportion, 29 (6%) were concerned with structure. Six of the comments were difficult to classify, hence they were coded as unclear.
The academic literacies approach problematises the content of feedback at the level of both epistemology and ontology (see Sutton, 2009; Lea and Street, 2000). At the level of epistemology, feedback should promote further learning and feed forward. At the level of ontology, feedback should encourage dialogic communication between
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the tutor and tutee. Taking the academic literacies position, therefore, forced me to go beyond the analysis of the type of feedback to an analysis of the depth of the feedback in terms of the dialogic principle.
Figure 7-7 Focus of comments
Out of the 273 comments on style, 117 (43%) were basically editorial commentaries which consisted of tutors restructuring students sentences, crossing, inserting, circling or underlining words or phrases, in most cases without any explanation given for the comments. In other words, these comments were focused on highlighting linguistic errors in students‘ texts. Fifty-eight of the stylistic comments were on references and citation, and generally signalled missing citations (45 out of 58) or errors (13 out of 58) in citation. Only five of the comments on referencing provided an illustration of the correct form of referencing. Fifty of the comments coded as style pointed to errors in presentation. Forty-nine of the style comments consisted of what Lea and Street (1998) call categorical modalities, which included imperatives such as ‗avoid!‘; ‗never use first person!‘, or words like ‗vague‘ or ‗awkward‘, as well as orthographic signs such as (? ! ^ x). These comments also acknowledged errors in students‘ work, ―with little mitigation or qualification‖ (Lea and Street, 1998 p. 167).
However, for the purposes of analysis, they were coded as a different category because they point to a different discourse. Commenting on his own use of the word
―vague‖ in giving feedback, Myers (1996 p. 4) demonstrates that he used it with different meanings such as to suggest a more precise alternative to a word; to criticise organisation, to ask for evidence for a generalisation or to point the failure to spell out the implications of specific findings. In this study, similar instances of
―vague‖ were also observed, without any comment or clarification as to why or to
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whom it was vague. Hence, use of the word vague in the feedback commentaries in this corpus was in itself vague. The implication is that such superficial feedback does not provide students with an opportunity to learn because it is ambiguous and mystified. There is need for language tutors to demystify their feedback language so that it is accessible to students.
Of the 182 comments coded under content, 98 were either questions (such as ―was this repeated?‖) or statements (―you said it did not garner any results‖) that required students to reflect on their content and provide explanations or clarifications. Forty- nine of the comments were focused on missing information and were less detailed:
for example, ―results?‖ or ―testing methodology?‖ Seventeen of the comments pointed to the relevance of the content to the topic or section of the report. Five comments pointed to the correctness of information, four indicated tutors‘ complete disagreement with the content, for example; ―No! You didn‘t prove that‖. There were also five comments which suggested plagiarism, and the remaining three comments were on presentation of content in terms of repetition. Twenty-nine comments were coded under the category of structure. Of these, 18 were concerned with organisation of the assignment as a whole (i.e., at the discourse level). These comments would query why certain information was in a certain section: for instance;
―this is messy! And should be in materials and apparatus‖. Eleven of the comments were concerned with sentence structure, in terms of length, relations with other sentences, paragraphing: for example; ―Keep sentences short and clear‖. In the entire corpus, there were only two comments which complemented students indicating tutors‘ positive evaluation of students work. The rest of the comments were mainly concerned with highlighting the deficiencies in students‘ writing, though most of these comments did not have a negative valence.
Sutton (2009) argues that feedback can challenge students at the level of meaning, identity and power and authority because of the various ways in which they can interpret it. It can challenge students‘ self-knowledge, and the asymmetrical relations between the student and tutor can also affect the meaning and identity of the students. Cast in this way, the socio-discursive space in which this feedback is given needs to be critiqued. The main finding related to the socio-discursive space relates to the dominant type of feedback that was evident in students‘ texts. It is clear that
the feedback that was given by tutors over the four-year period focused on technical and stylistic aspects such as grammar, referencing and presentation – what Lea and Street (2000; 1998) call technical or academic skills. It is important to note that the focus on academic skills is not useless in itself. After all, the academic literacies approach privileged in this study incorporates the study skills approach, but, as Lea and Street (2000) would argue, addressing these skills takes on different meanings when the context is entirely that of study skills. This is because in the study skills approach, it is assumed that these academic skills can be easily learnt and transferred to other literacy contexts. Analysis of the feedback corpora indicates that the comments classified as stylistic (focusing of academic skills) were mainly concerned with either noting or fixing ‗errors‘ in students‘ writing. It is a fact that fixing students texts will enable both the tutor and the student to achieve the goals of a particular task, in this case, students pass the Technical Communication course.
Seemingly, the goals of learning have been achieved, but do students understand the feedback? Basing his argument on the existing literature on error correction, Truscott (1996 p. 328) has argued that error correction is ineffective in that it does not produce better writers, and harmful because students do not learn for themselves. I also believe that fixing students‘ academic skills problems does not encourage further learning. Rather, it creates learners who will depend on writing consultants and editors for the rest of their academic life. Moreover, the data in this study suggests that while students incorporated the corrections made by the tutors in their final drafts, they made the same errors in the other instances in the final drafts where the similar linguistic structures were used.
What was also evident in the feedback corpus was that most of the comments were task- focused; they focused on the task that students had already done, and were thus meant to help students achieve the goals of the Technical Communication course. Considering that the Technical Communication for Engineers course is considered developmental in the sense that it is meant to prepare students for the writing that they do in subsequent Engineering courses, this raises a very critical issue related to whether it is achieving the purposes for which it is meant to. Using Lea and Street‘s (2000) terms, feedback in this course fed backward, not forward, where a forward-pointing feedback would be less concerned with tasks that have already been covered. Feedback from tutors in the Technical Communication course
was mainly focused on the immediate task of giving evidence to students of errors in their work, such as the need to provide more information, and was implicitly related to the quality of a particular text. Such an approach is characteristic of what Rose (1985) has referred to as the ‗myth of transience‘, the belief that if we can just do x or y, the problem will be solved. In this case, x or y is characterised by the fixing of errors in student writing.
The type of feedback that was given by the tutors suggests that they considered that students were representing themselves in ways that were unsatisfactory. From an academic literacies perspective, such feedback is counterproductive, and follows what Sutton calls the ―transmission model of learning which supposes that tutors transmit feedback messages concerning the strengths and weaknesses of assessment which students then receive and put into practice‖ (Sutton, 2009 p. 3).
There is no question, however, that feedback is an indispensable element of the teaching and learning process and that it can encourage and consolidate learning. It is also a key element in the co-construction of a discursive identity (Gee, 2001) and of legitimate participation in a discourse community (Lave and Wenger, 1991). But if it is to be useful, it has to be perceived as part of a dialogue or conversation between students and their instructors. Superficial feedback regarding features of language does not aid the development of meaning.
I now move on to the analysis of the second data set that relates to the critical realist domain of the actual; the classroom observations.