THE USE OF “TRACK CHANGES” IN MICROSOFT WORD TO PROVIDE FEEDBACK IN STUDENTS’ WRITING

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Providing feedback in second language writing is an integral task that must be done by Writing teachers. This task, in many cases, is very tiring and time consuming. The purpose of this study is to see how “Track Changes” menu in Microsoft Word can be used to help L2 writing teachers in providing grammar feedback. This study used 2 groups of students as the control group and the treatment one. The students were taking Writing 4 Course at College of Languages of Sultan Agung Islamic University (UNISSULA). For the control group, students were required to write their writing work on paper, and submitted them to the researcher (teacher). The researcher then provided feedbacks of grammar inaccuracies found on the work by giving the accurate forms somewhere on their writing sheets and returned them to the students. For the treatment group, students were required to type their writing work on Microsoft Word document (doc.) and emailed them to the researcher who then provided feedbacks of grammar inaccuracies directly on the text by activating “Track Changes” menu. The work then was sent back to each student. The experiment lasted for four weeks in which in each week a student completed a short piece of writing. At the end of the experiment, each student from both groups wrote an essay on Microsoft Word document and emailed it to the researcher. The essays were rated by three different raters. The scores of the two groups were compared to see the effectiveness of the method. The discussion also includes students’ perception on the use of that method. Using “Track Changes” menu could be an innovative method of feedback provision.

Nama Prosiding : Proceeding International 2010 Bringing Linguistics and Literature into EFL Classroom
ISSN : 978-979-1098-03-22
Tahun : 2010
Peneliti : Hartono,,
Diunggah tanggal : Selasa, 2014-01-21