ISSN 2348-3024 Volume 6 Number3 Journal of Advances in Linguistics 1063 | Page Council for Innovative Research June 2016 www.cirworld.com STUDENTS’ PERCEPTIONS TOWARDS THE EFFECTIVE FEEDBACK PRACTICES IN THE LARGE EFL WRITING CLASS BASED ON STUDENTS’ ENGLISH PROFICIENCY LEVEL Rini Susanti (rini_deddy@yahoo.com) Universitas Muhammadiyah Palembang Jalan Jenderal A Yani, Palembang ABSTRACT Motivated by my own experience in teaching and learning academic writing in a large class of more than 50 students, I aim to find out the students’ perceptions towards the effective feedback practices in a large EFL writing class in Indonesia. There were 150 students participating by answering the the questionnaire. The data was analyzed based on English proficiency level (the students’ TOEFL scores). The findings showed that based on the students’ English proficiency level, they perceived feedback from their lecturers is effective when it is given in written form, while from their peers, it should be in oral form. KEYWORDS feedback, perception, large class, writing, English proficiency level 1. INTRODUCTION Writing is not only about putting the letters together to form words, then combining them to make sentences, and arranging them to become paragraphs, but it is about choosing the appropriate vocabulary, forming the meaning, and organizing the ideas. According to Sokolik as cited in Eksi (2010) “Writing is the mental work of inventing ideas, thinking about how to express them, and organizing them into statements and paragraphs that will be clearer to the reader” (p. 33). Good writing will be understandable both by the writer and the readers. It is the way to communicate ideas in written form. As one component of the writing processes, feedback (corrections and comments) is needed to support students’ writing development and build their confidence in writing. Specifically, according to Hyland (2003) “feedback helps the writer work out the text’s potential and to comprehend the writing context, providing a sense of audience and an understanding of expectations of the communities they are writing for” (p. 177). As English learners who use English as a Foreign Language (EFL), writing means communicating with the readers by making the communication understandable in both ways. Since every language has its own style in writing, the input from the readers is very helpful as a way of communicating the ideas and writing components. Teachers can use feedback as a way of communicating the strength and the weaknesses of their students (Mcgrath, Taylor, & Phycyl, 2011). 2. THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK Comparing the feedback from teacher and peers, students prefer to choose teacher feedback as the feedback that they need the most. According to Cresswell (2000) “the advantages of teacher feedback are first, intervention, teacher response to students’ questions annotated in the margin of writings, is directed to students’ ideas in the developing of essays. Teacher feedback is exactly what student writers need in terms of global content (theme, purpose and readership) and organization (argument structure, main and supporting points). Second, teacher response can be more accurately targeted at the levels of students’ language proficiency” (p. 238). Peer feedback itself is defined by Kroll (2001) as “simply putting students together in groups and then having each students read and react to the strength and weaknesses of each other’s papers” (p. 228). To this, research still agreed and argued about peer feedback as the effective practice to be applied in ESL/EFL writing classes. Besides concerning the feedback from teacher and peers, the ways of giving/providing the feedback both from the lecturers or peers also have the very significant difference. First of all, the feedback can be given in two ways; in oral and written forms. According to Berg and Pilot “writt en feedback was concentrated mainly on evaluative comments, whereas in the oral feedback students provided arguments and suggestions for text revision” (p. 145-146). After the feedback is known to be effective when it is given in oral or written forms, the lecturers need to know whether their students need to have the feedback directly by showing the errors and the correction (Bitchener, Young, & Cameron, 2005; Ferris & Roberts, 2001). Another thing is whether the feedback is given by showing the errors only without having many corrections (Ellis, 2009). Besides this, whether the feedback is given in the earlier text or in the last of the final paper, M. Yang et al (2006) indicates about the reason when the feedback is best given by the lecturers/peers as follows: He: if the teacher gives feedback first, the peer would feel the pressure and say nothing for fear of saying something wrong because we all trust the teacher more. But if the peer gives feedback first, he would be much freer to express his opinions. Teacher feedback that comes later could evaluate both the essay and the peer’s comments, which, I think, is of great help (p. 194).