Students felt comfortable with the use of symbol feedback
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2011 also found that the students feel frustrated when they find their drafts full of error marking p.21. Based on the interview, 6 from 18 33 students said that symbol feedback
could make them down. The word down here meant that the students felt disappointed with themselves. They judge themselves that they were not good enough in writing. However, this
feeling was not their problems, even it encouraged them to improve their writing. Some of the students found symbol feedback could make them disappointed with
themselves. Surprisingly this feeling could motivate them to write better :
Extract 15 Rena
“When I see many symbols in my paper, I feel so disappointed because I make so many mistakes. Actually it makes me feel that my writing is not good, so next time I should delete all
those symbols. I mean make my writing better, so
there is no more symbols.”
Extract 16 Stefani
“I feel so disappointed because there are too many errors in my writing. So, I just disappointed with myself.”
The statements showed that the students actually did not like to see any symbol in their papers, even the students who liked symbol feedback had the same feeling. The students
needed symbol feedback, but when they received it, they wanted to clean it. That was the reason why symbol feedback could motivate the students to improve their writing through
negative feeling. This finding was supported by Lee 2003 as cited in Cavana 2009 who stated,
“Negative feedback does affect students‟ engagement and motivation”p.2. This statement gave clearer evidence that symbol feedback could motivate the students in dealing
with any difficulty in writing since it was not only deliver positive feeling, but also through negative feeling. However, there was another finding by Mahfoodh 2011, who found that
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harmful effects of feedback might lead the students to ignore teachers‟ feedback p.22. This
research found opposite finding that the student tended to ignore the feedback because they thought that the teacher did not really understand about their writing. Based on the data, it was
found that the students did not ignore the feedback. It was true that they felt frustrated when they found marks in their writing, but it gave the students lessons that could motivated them to
write better.