Corrective Feedback and Writing
By Youngju Lee
The Person that Most Influenced my Life
I would like to express my deep regards and appreciate to my supervisor professor who helped
me alot during my study in the College and helped me alot during my project to get the B.Sc.
from the College.
After that he advised me to complete my post graduate and help me alot to get an admission from
the university here in the United State
I never forget the time I spent with him, and I'd never forgotten his kindness and helpful during
my study and during my working as a teacher assistant in my University from which I get a full
scholarship to complete my study here. He is the best teacher of mine, all the time he said to me
"Consider me as your father, brother, friend...etc." he is really the best younger brother of mine.
I really can't return back his favor, he made me make up my mind to complete my study, and he
offered me all what I want. He encouraged me and help me to come here for studying, before
that I refused to complete the study. All times he invited me to his office and talk to me, solve
my problems and advice me how to get the best things, the best friends, how to life with peoples,
how to solve the problems you may contact and not resign for these life.
I'll never forget this person, and I hope I can do everything for him to return back a portion that
he did for me.
***From this activity, I became aware of the difficulty of corrective feedback especially on
writing.
In this essay, it’s maybe because my grammar knowledge is far from being sufficient.
Also, even in case the way some sentences are written is no problem grammatically, still they
can look inappropriate or unnatural, what should I do?
Actually this short composition doesn’t have many problems in its intelligibility or
communicability. I can understand for sure what he wanted to say. But still, it’s very lacking as a
good writing, mainly due to its frequent grammatical errors, not only in an individual sentence
level but also in wider perspective. For example, when he said " he is really the best younger
brother of mine.”, what does that mean? It’s confusing, because till then the story doesn’t
sound like ‘the superviser professor’ is younger than the writer.
And another example, among the expressions ‘I never forget, I’ve never forgotten’, ‘I’ll
never forget’, is there any clear reason to differentiate the tense like this? Is it necessarily so?
Even though the meaning of each looks almost same in the context? I felt quite confused over
this kind of matter.
In my view, writing is particularly tricky for instructors to give feedback to learners.
Because writing skill requires ‘appropriateness’ or ‘eloquence’ in its use of vocabulary or
expression as a completed piece of writing, as well as grammatical correctness at the same
time. I, as a non-native English speaker myself, feel quite inadequate in this sense. So when I
write an English composition as an ELL, let alone as a prospective teacher, quite often I felt at a
loss. At the time, the only thing I can do is trying to make it clear through looking to google or
webdictionary. However, many times, it just turned out it’s not easy to decide clearly , whether
some English usage is correct or not. Perhaps, I have to go a long long way.