A Critical Review

RESOURCE REVIEW-FINAL VERSION

A Critical Review of Sugita, 2006, The impact of teachers' comment types on students' revision, ELT Journal, vol. 60, no. 1, pp 34-41.

The following review is on a journal article entitled "The impact of teachers' comment types on students' revision" by Yoshihito Sugita, a full-time English lecturer with a special interest in research and pedagogy in second language writing. The research which was published in the ELT Journal Volume 60/1, January 2006 is an investigation of the influence of teachers' three handwritten comment types on EFL students' revisions. Through considering the changes in 142 students' papers or 71 pairs consisting of students' drafts which had received teacher commentary and their subsequent revisions, the study aims to "identify whether certain types of feedback appeared to be more or less influential in the students' revision process". The eight-page report is well organized with three main parts clearly presented as Introduction, Investigation in which literature review, the subjects, the procedure and the results are discussed and Conclusions. In this small-scale but useful study, Sugita's findings provide EFL teachers with interesting experimental facts to take into consideration while making between-draft written comments. However, several limitations must be considered in interpreting the study's findings.

First and foremost, a condensed introduction was offered to give readers an overview of the main focus of the research as well as the background for the research procedure. It was clearly stated that the research aimed to "examine the relationships between the changes in the students' revisions and the influence of the teachers' three comment types: statements, imperatives, and questions". The author, to some extent, made a considerable effort to relate the research with the previous studies on the effects of teachers' between-draft comments. The same findings of Sommers (1982) and Zamel (1985) were reported that students' revisions show inadequate responses to the teacher commentary. This result raised the questions of clarity as the teachers' first consideration or the necessity of finding more effective commentary types in order to " provide students with clearer, more acceptable between-draft comments''. Especially, the detailed description of the study by Ferris (1997) on the effects of each comment type on students' revision intrigued the author to do research to answer the question of "whether imperative comments are more influential on revisions than questions or statements". The literature review makes me feel that this research is worthy and fits into the big picture of teacher commentary in composition class. Nevertheless, the study by Beach (1979), in my opinion, should not have been included in this part: Effects of between-draft comments since its main argument, as illustrated by Sugita, did not clearly show what effects teachers' comments had on students' revision. "Beach (1979) ...argued that teachers should focus on content...more than form ... and provide a single dimension of content feedback between initial and final drafts of papers".

Second, for the main part of the research, it would be undeniable that an attempt was made to provide readers with a detailed description of the study including the subjects, the sample, feedback and analysis procedure as well as the results. The study was carried out at a four-year private university with 75 native speakers of Japanese who belong to three practical English classes, 25 students for each group. These participants were asked to do an assignment: "Write your opinion about a social or environmental problem". Three drafts for the assignment were assigned, and then the copies of the students' second and third drafts were collected by the author for analysis. Three types of comments were applied to students' second draft and the third draft was students' revision basing on teacher commentary. I appreciate the author's explanation of the fixed expressions used for functioning as teacher content feedback with the aim to "obtain more objective evidence of students' response to the written comment". Another impressive point is the fact that not only the teacher -researcher but also the second teacher participated in the analysis procedure, which would reduce the subjectivity and bias associated with such an assessment. Moreover, what attracts the readers' attention is the author's contribution to clarifying the terms "minimal'' and ''substantive'' through the understandable examples in the Appendix.

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