p.2. From those two definitions, we can conclude that feedback is an important part of teaching and learning activity so that the learners can improve their
performance on what they have learned.
b. Purpose of Feedback
Lewis 2002; p. 3-4 provides several purposes of feedback for both teachers and students. First, feedback provides information for teachers and
students. Teachers can collect about individual and collective progress that can be one of the forms of evaluations on their own teaching. For students, feedback
is an ongoing form of assessment which is more focused than mark or grades. The second is to give students advice in learning. Through feedback, the
teachers can give some comment about students’ learning processes that the students can understand their strength which can be developed and their
weaknesses that have to be evaluated. The third purpose is to provide students with language input. Both
teachers’ written and spoken feedback provides students with meaningful and individual input. The teacher’s feedback can illustrate how language is used in
one to one communication. Therefore, it is important to extend students’ language by writing comments in language at a level slightly higher than the
students’ own current language use. It can make students learn new vocabulary and structures in context.
Feedback can also be a motivation for the students. Feedback can encourage the students to study and use language to the best of their ability by
taking into account whatever the teacher knows about the learners’ attitude. The last purpose of feedback is to lead students toward autonomy.
Feedback can lead students to the point where they can find their own mistakes. By knowing their strengths and weaknesses, the students are encouraged to be
autonomous students. In the process of writing, students often do not realize their mistakes;
therefore as also stated by Lewis 2002 feedback is needed to revise those writings which are ultimately expected to improve the quality of their writings.
Williams 2003 also states that, “The goal of feedback is to teach skills that help students improve their writing proficiency to the point where they are
cognizant of what is expected of them as writers and are able to produce it with minimal errors and maximum clarity.”
c. Focus on Feedback
There are two categories of the focus on feedback which are form and content. According to Fathman and Whalley 1990 I n Chiang 2004, feedback
on form focus on grammar and mechanic error p.90. There are some commons strategies in providing this kind of feedback. They are teacher’s correction is
surface errors in which the students required to copy all the corrections, teacher’s marking that indicate the place and type of error but without
correction, teacher’s underlining to indicate only the presence of errors
William, 2003. Based on Park 2006, form feedback is one of the most commonly used methods. It focuses on students’ grammatical knowledge.
According to William 2003, content feedback focus on comments on organization, ideas, and amount of detail. In feedback on content, the corrector
points out problems and offers suggestions to improve the future revision. Using this feedback, the students are expected to incorporate information from the
comment into the version of their writing.
d. Source of Feedback
Lewis 2002; p. 15-23 explains that there are three sources of feedback, namely teacher feedback, peer feedback, and self correction.
1 Teacher Feedback
In many sources, teachers are the main sources of feedback on both oral and written language. One of the ways of teacher feedback is
traditional marking. In traditional marking, it means that teachers make marks on the students’ writing. The marks can be in form of words as
the comments or some symbols such as underlining. One of the weaknesses of this method is that some teachers spend
more time correcting students’ writing than their students spend looking at the corrections. In a result the students less understand how
to revise the writing. Besides traditional marking, the conferencing method is usually
done by the teachers to give feedback to their students. The one to one
conference between writer and teacher is the chance to discuss the students’ work in a combination of commenting and questioning. One
of problem of this technique is the time management. In a large class individual time can be difficult to organize.
Another variation of teacher feedback is through collective feedback. In this collective feedback, the teacher looks at everyone’s
work, noting the points that need feedback, but to present the comment collectively, either orally, or on the paper or on the board. The teacher
notes silently the points as they are made by individuals but comment on the comment on them to the whole class. Through this kind of
feedback, the students will not be ashamed with their friends because the teacher does not directly point the students who make the errors.
Therefore, the students need to be active in looking at their own work to find the reason for their mark.
2 Peer Feedback
The students usually will get bore if they just get feedback only from their teacher. The students should have another variety of
suggestion and comment on their writing. The idea of peer feedback will be great to be implemented in the writing class as one of ways to
improve students’ writing and keep the writing class always interesting.
From a socio-cognitive perspective, peer feedback can be seen as a formative developmental process that gives the writers opportunities to
