Enhancing interaction in teacher-student academic writing conferences : an action research approach in the post-secondary context

Abstract

Writing conferences give both students and teachers a chance to communicate and interact so as to improve a piece of academic writing. Such teacher-student writing conferences on academic essays have been a compulsory part of the academic English writing classrooms in the post-secondary college I work at, yet their effectiveness in promoting active student participation in dialogue and supporting production of good quality essays is unclear. This study thus aims at investigating ways of enhancing students’ participation in the teacher-student writing conferences with reference to Vygotskyan Sociocultural Theory and the concept of feedback literacy. Employing educational action research, the current study aims to enhance the practice of teacher-student writing conferences in an English as a second language writing classroom. The study questions the means and the ends of achieving dialogic feedback process in the conferencing process amidst concerns about routinized, uni-directional writing conferences. Through the triangulation of data from different sources, such as recordings of the writing conference sessions, comparing the outline and the written work of students, and interviews with students, the study provides insights into how various measures may lead to higher level of student participation in writing conferences in post-secondary English classrooms. The data of the three action research cycles were qualitatively analysed and an explanatory model has been developed to encapsulate the wide range of factors contributing to enhanced interaction during writing conferences, with reference to the theoretical framework of Sociocultural Theory. Theoretically, this study has shown that the more knowledgeable other in the Zone of Proximal Development under Vygotskyan Sociocultural Theory can be the teacher or their peers, and scaffolding may occur given the right mix of trust, intellectual and emotional support. In terms of feedback literacy, affect has played an important role in students’ reception of and acting on the feedback received. Teachers may adopt an open attitude towards adopting different measures to elicit higher level of participation from students in feedback encounter during writing conferences. Pedagogically, students can be prompted and guided to exhibit higher level of participation by preparation before the writing conferences, such as answering reflection questions and carrying out a mini-task. Students may also demonstrate a higher level of participation when they have a trusted peer by their side during the writing conferences, and when they have the choice of switching between languages they are confident to use. The study has also illustrated the mitigating effect writing conferences may have on negative written feedback, which can contribute to the affective side of enabling students to make use of feedback on their academic writing.