Learning to be expert writers : feedback in secondary English

Feedback is a cultural tool through which English teachers can facilitate secondary students’ evaluative expertise in their writing development. While there is increased concern to use feedback to enhance learning at all educational levels, there is currently little empirical knowledge of how secondary teachers of English design feedback for complex appraisal. Using data from two qualitative studies, this paper explores practices drawing on Anglophone cultures of secondary schooling for subject English. Observation, artefact and interview data are analysed using a socio-cultural theoretical lens. Cultural tools including student planners, peer feedback and discussion linked students’ self-regulated learning to community norms for evaluating written texts. Two distinctive feedback conditions for written texts in the school subject of English are identified: the disciplinary practices of evaluation of texts within community cultural values, and the role of cultural tools in co-regulation of learning in the classroom context.

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