The Interaction between student responses and aspects of text commented on in the revision process in a single-draft and a multi-draft class

Abstract

ABSTRACT This study attenuated to investigate if teacher comments on aspects of text have an impact on student responses. Three hypotheses were tested and observations were made concerning teacher comments on patterns of aspects of text and student responses in the revision process in a single-draft approach (SDA) and a multi-draft approach (MDA). A total of twenty EFL learners participated in the study. The SDA class revised their compositions once and the MDA class revised two times. The first hypothesis was that MDA students would make a higher number of rearrangement and addition changes while the SDA students would make more substitution and deletion changes. The analysis of data confirmed part of the hypothesis and rejected the other part. MDA students made a higher number of rearrangement changes (22.295) than SDA students (3.1%), but MDA students made more addition changes {6.9%} than the SDA students (5.5%) although the result does not suggest a significant difference. SDA students made more substitution changes (42.5%) and fewer deletion changes as compared to the MDA (6.2% and 13.8% respectively). Thus, the first hypothesis is partly rejected and partly confirmed. The second hypothesis was that there would bedifferent patterns of aspects of text in terms of ranking in each draft approach. The analysis of the data indicated that although comments on syntax predominated in both the SDA (54.3%) and the MDA (43%), comments on lexicon were ranked second with orthography third in the SDA, whereas in the MDA comments on content (27.7%) were ranked second with lexicon (23.6%) third. Thus, the second hypothesis is accepted. The third hypothesis that student responses to specific aspects of text in particular, content, lexicon, and syntax, would differ in each draft approach is accepted since 30% of the responses to content in the SDA involved rewrite, whereas in the MDA there was no response of that type. On the other hand, in the MDA, in response to comments on lexicon, 31.2% resulted in ignore changes, whereas in the SDA the ratio of ignore category was 0%.