Season 1 - Episode 8 - Feedback on Academic Writing

Intro

[00:00:53] Welcome back to another episode of All Things EAP. I'm Sanchia Rodrigues from the University of Warwick in the UK.

[00:01:01] And I'm Xiaoqing Bi from Xi'an Jiao Tong Liverpool University.

[00:01:05] So Sanchia, I think this is the first time in our podcast that we have five guests from five different time zones.

[00:01:11] I was glad to be able to make that happen. And I'm really excited for everybody to hear this discussion just because the perspectives of the four speakers are so, so different. And the contexts that they work in are really different too.

[00:01:23] So you'll be hearing from Madhu Neupane Bastola at Hong Kong Polytechnic University; Angeliki Apostolidou, at the American College of Greece; Peter Davidson at Zayed University in Dubai; and Monalisha at the University of Hyderabad in India.

[00:01:41] What I found really interesting this episode is the way they talk about feedback literacy and how it ties in with emotional baggage which students often bring to the process.

[00:01:52] Yeah, I really liked the description of the autopsy. With teaching, it's one of the only jobs where you see it done in front of you for 14 years before you ever do it yourself. And so I know in the past I've been guilty of unconsciously bringing those practices to my teaching. You know, I was given feedback this way and so that's how I conceive of feedback, and actually this episode, it's just a reminder of how important it is to keep questioning every part of your practice and asking does this come from a place of knowledge and, development? Or does this come from a place of, this is what I know.

[00:02:22] Yeah. And it's interesting that one of the participants is also a PhD student, so it is, from the student's point of view, how they received the feedback, how the different kinds of feedback make them feel.

[00:02:32] Reflecting on really bad feedback that I've had , it's not actually that the critique was a bad one or an unfair one even. It's just that I didn't see it coming, and it's really hard to hear that sometimes. It's almost not a comment on your writing. It's a comment on your sense of self, isn't it?

[00:02:46] Yeah, I remember feedback that student give to me about my teaching at the end of the lesson. One student said, come to me, I think that part of the session kind of interrupted the flow of the whole lesson. I was like, OK, thank you? and I explain why I designed that activity and, the whole design of, of that lesson. 

[00:03:05] The one that stands out to me on my writing, I came into, my master's degree from an undergraduate degree in maths, I was writing a literature review for the first time. And I sent my supervisor what I had written, and he replied with just one sentence. It said, this is not a literature review. I had to take like three days to recover emotionally. But the thing is, he was right and he didn't need to say anything else because I had to, you know, I had to dump it. I had to start again. and he's my PhD supervisor now, and I love his feedback because he says exactly what I need to do and he doesn't say any more or any less. 

[00:03:40] Yeah, we get to know each other, know what kind feedback you like you get used to it. 

[00:03:45] Yeah, I think that's something that underpins a lot of the talking points in this discussion is relationship and trust so that you can do all of these other things that Monalisha, Peter, Madhu and Angeliki talk about.

[00:03:58] So without further ado, here's our discussion about feedback on academic writing. We really hope you enjoy listening to it. 

[00:04:07] I'm here with four people I'm really excited to speak to. Let's start with a few introductions. Monalisha, tell us a bit about who you are and where you are right now.

[00:04:18] Hello everyone. I am Monalisha and I have just obtained my doctorate from the University of Hyderabad, India. In my doctoral research, I engage with academic writing in multilingual context and the complexities associated with it in terms of the social as well as structural, that is the linguistic complexities.

[00:04:40] Thanks Monalisha, it's great to have you here. Peter, how about you? Where are you right now?

[00:04:46] Hi. Yeah, my name's Peter Davidson. I'm in Dubai, where it's about 45 degrees in the shade. I teach at Zayed University in Dubai. I've been there for about 26 years now. I mainly teach writing, academic writing, technical writing, and business writing. And of course that involves lots and lots of feedback.

[00:05:07] Yeah.

[00:05:08] Thank you so much. Um, Madhu how about you?

[00:05:10] Hi everyone. I'm Madhu Neupane Bastola. I am originally from Nepal. Currently I am in Hong Kong working as a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of English and Communication, Hong Kong Polytechnic University. I was teacher for many years in Tribhuvan University Nepal, where I have supervised many Masters students and MPhil students as well. So I did my PhD on supervisory feedback here in Hong Kong. That was about mostly the issues that we are going to discuss here, like feedback, effectiveness, challenges and multiple factors. My PhD was on master thesis supervision, on supervisory feedback on Nepal. So later I did postdoctoral research on similar aspect on master's thesis supervision here in Hong Kong I have experience of supervising and receiving feedback, giving feedback, so that's my major area of interest. 

[00:06:10] Thanks so much for joining us. And last but definitely not least, Angeliki. 

[00:06:15] Hi, I'm Angeliki Apostolidou. I live in Greece, but I work in the UK in the summer. Uh, I'm a casual EAP practitioner, mainly teaching pre sessional programs. I've been doing this for the last eight summers. Uh, in winter I am based in Athens where I teach academic writing at, the American College of Greece. And I've just completed my Masters on Professional Education Practice. Feedback is integral to developing students' writing skills, academic writing skills. So I'm really involved with developing myself as a feedback provider and receiver.

[00:06:59] Great. I think this is gonna be a fantastic episode.

[00:07:01] I've Okay, well let's start off with where you took us there, Angeliki. What can feedback look like? It sounds like it can take on loads of different forms.

[00:07:10] Yes. There are different types and modes of feedback: written, oral feedback peer feedback, teacher feedback, long-term feedback, immediate feedback. There are many, many different types. Spoken feedback like in tutorials can be more nuanced and supportive. It allows me to gauge student reactions, adjust my tone, use intonation and body language to soften my critique, let's say, and it's more immediate whereas in written feedback, what I say might come across slightly vague unless it's expanded or exemplified. On the other hand, written feedback gives students something more tangible to revisit. So it makes me wonder whether it's like a combination of both would be ideal.

[00:08:05] So that idea you mentioned about feedback sometimes being vague or open to misinterpretation or the student maybe not knowing what it was that you meant, that's something that you look at in your research, isn't it Madhu, about the differences in how supervisors intend their feedback and how students receive it?

[00:08:22] Yeah, so in many cases I found that students do not get what supervisors intend to convey. So mostly because supervisor, in my research I found like they fail to take students' perspective into consideration. when they were giving feedback, they would say something like: "elaborate on this". So that was the feedback. The supervisor might have known what elaboration was required, but when I talked to a student, they said that, I don't know, how can I elaborate on that? Because there were no guidelines, no specific details. A simila r example, identify research gap. So for Master's students especially, most of them were doing research for the first time. So establishing research gap was tough. So they might have benefited if supervisor provided, like, okay, this is how you establish research gap, for example, you can see a gap in terms of places you can see gap in terms of participants, or you can see gap in terms of what methodologies have been applied earlier, or theoretical framework. If guidelines were like that, they would be able to see. Otherwise just, okay, elaborate on theoretical framework, justify this, edit your language. That was also very difficult for many students because when they wrote, they tried their best so they didn't know how to edit. Simple thing, but when we see from a student's perspective, so many of the comments lack any specific content. So in that sense, they were confusing, ambiguous, and didn't help the student at all.

[00:10:08] Monalisha, Peter, is that something you've experienced either as writers, as teachers, as researchers?

[00:10:15] Absolutely. Over the years, I've found that my feedback and, and a lot of other people's feedback is pretty vague, pretty imprecise, making vague suggestions as, as Madhu said about, you know, so for me it's really important that the feedback is actionable and that means that it's clear and concise. And that the students can understand it and therefore act on it is pretty important. But for a number of years, I was, I tried to use written feedback and I just found it was really kind of time consuming and the students didn't really read it.

[00:10:51] So I, I sort of go down the oral feedback route. I, I like to meet with students one-on-one or in groups and give feedback orally. I find that to be much more effective. 

[00:11:03] Another important thing I've been thinking about lately is that the feedback also leads to some kind of learning, because when we're talking about feedback, we might just think about feedback that this particular task, this particular essay or this piece of writing, I, I think there's something that goes beyond that, that there's gotta be some kind of learning that the students learn something and then apply that to their next piece of writing. I think that's a really key part of effective feedback as well.

[00:11:31] How? How do you ensure that happens? Or how do you create an environment where that feed forward actually takes place, aside from the way that you write that feedback? Is there anything else that we can do as teachers?

[00:11:46] I, I'll talk about receiving feedback because it's very recent for me and, you know, my interactions with my supervisor uh, we mostly had meetings and she would do a mixed kind of feedback that was spoken as well as written. She would assess my writing on the spot and give me written comments as well as spoken comments. So, uh, there are times when she would just question me. She would read a sentence of my literature review and she would just say, so what? Somebody said this. So what, and this has been a very consistent question that she has asked me throughout my PhD journey, that whenever I am writing something, I just keep asking myself, so what, so what is your contribution to it is essentially what you have to get to.
[00:12:41] But as, as a writer, you and your supervisor are mostly on very, very different levels. They have a very different opinion of your writing, and you think every time you write , there's a sense of accomplishment that you have every time you do a piece of writing. So every time you do a writing and you feel like you've accomplished something, then when you go to your supervisor, they just dissect it and they tell you, okay, this is not right.

[00:13:09] So the first feeling that gets to you is the exhaustion and you know, I don't know, irritation. it's like an autopsy has been done onto your best accomplishment that you did last week, perhaps. So there's also an affective gap in terms of receiving feedback.

[00:13:29] I would like to add something here in terms of affective gap. So while we are providing feedback or while we are receiving feedback, we want to, uh, pay attention to I think three things. One is autonomy. So we can do things the way we like. And competence. So supervisors supervisors or teachers need to provide feedback according to our level, not according to their level. So where we are and what prior experiences we have and how we can understand, or Peter was already saying. They need to provide extra level guidelines. So it's not only, uh, where you are, like Monalisha was saying, dissecting your writing and saying, okay, this is not right. this is feedback. So there should be feed forward as well, okay, this is not right, and what next? How can you move ahead? So that part is usually missing. So the need to provide that part.

[00:14:37] And in terms of like affective need, I also examined feedback in terms of language. supervisors are not very careful just one word can damage students' confidence. 

[00:14:52] Definitely. 

[00:14:53] So, for example, in my research, I found comments like, there is no point in commenting on your work because it's not up to the point. But for students, whatever they have written, mostly students try their best.
[00:15:08] So my take on feedback is that either we should help students or we should not say anything hurts them or damages them. It's not about constructive feedback. There can be constructive feedback. It is necessary, but sometime certain comments are actually not focused on the text itself or task itself but on individual. So yes, a student's affective needs need to be addressed. Otherwise feedback will not make any sense to them because they will not be involved cognitively and behaviorally on the comments that hurt them in the first place.

[00:15:53] Some real challenges there then in terms of the the kind of emotional baggage that can come along with the words that we use, the way that we write, what we comment on . Monalisha, I've never heard it referred to as an autopsy but I love metaphor. 

[00:16:08] To add to what Monalisha said, according to Hyland, feedback isn't about what's wrong with the writing. It's about what's possible for the writer. So that question, you, you had to answer was to assess your own understanding of the feedback you received? So in a way, it's about your own personal growth and academic identity when interpreting the feedback you receive. 

[00:16:34] I think this relates to this idea of feedback literacy. We need to train our students to be feedback literate. And that means they need to be able to understand different types of feedback from teacher and peers and computer, they need to know how to deal with it and how to make judgements for themselves and how to not be defensive and manage that affect, and take action. So all that, uh, feedback, literacy, I think we sometimes bypass that and we don't train our students actually how to, to manage the feedback that they get. 

[00:17:03] How do you train your students to do that? Peter? Is there a resource that you found particularly helpful? Is it something that you've picked up through teaching experience?

[00:17:11] I train my students when I'm, when I'm giving feedback because my style is probably quite a lot different from a lot of other teachers that they've had , and I, as I said, I, I only give oral feedback so in the beginning when I'm, when I'm giving feedback, often it's in a group, on a group project. I'll be asking the students lots of questions and saying, why did you do it this way? Could you have done it any better? And they're often not very forthcoming with, uh, with their responses. And then I have to explain, okay, well, in this feedback session. It's just, it's just not me giving you feedback. I want feedback from you about what I'm saying. So I, I train them by, by, as I'm going through the whole process and it doesn't take long 'cause other students see, you know, how I'm, how I'm operating and go, oh, okay, this is quite a little bit different. It's not all negative, it's not all positive. And then I'll definitely say things like, especially with AI feedback, you know, when I sit down with 'em, I go, well, how are you gonna incorporate this AI feedback into your writing? And how are you gonna take action? That's an important part of the feedback literacy for students.

[00:18:13] Let's talk about questioning, because I can see that's a big part of your approach there. Peter, and Monalisha, you mentioned it earlier that your supervisor asked that same question over and over again, such that. It got to a point where you would ask yourself that question without her needing to repeat it. Angeliki, I know your coaching approach is based a lot on questioning as well, isn't it?

[00:18:31] Yes. I, what, what I have been practicing recently and experimenting on is um, adopting a coaching approach, coaching conversations in feedback tutorials. I tried it, uh, last summer and it worked really well because it transformed traditional feedback tutorials into more a more collaborative learning experience, which I found really empowering for students. Attentive listening and asking powerful questions was. Key. And as Peter said, asking for feedback for my feedback made the students, much more involved in the process of, uh, appreciating and more open to receiving the feedback.

[00:19:19] When you say feedback on your feedback, could you give us an example for someone who's never been in a coaching tutorial with you?

[00:19:26] Well if, we provide, uh, written feedback for students, an essay, for example, for students' work, um, we allow the student to reflect on it and then when we meet in the tutorial session to give oral feedback, we, for example, start by asking students how they felt about their written feedback and what they are proud of at this point. Instead of just focusing on the problems. In other words, it's not just about correcting mistakes or appearing as experts.

[00:20:05] You know, the whole structure of research writing for a thesis is such that you're you are always trying to find an answer to a research question, or you're trying to find an answer to whether a hypothesis is, uh, right or wrong , but, in the beginning or for quite some time into your research journey, you don't really know that you have to keep asking yourself questions as well. In your process of answering that question, the inbuilt questioning is when you learn the whole process of academic writing, of breaking each step, of writing your research.

[00:20:42] Okay. So far we've talked about lots of different aspects of feedback. We've talked about written versus spoken. We've talked about feed forward. We've talked about that danger of ambiguity and all the emotional and affective issues that get tangled up in feedback.

[00:20:57] But what does it mean for writers to have autonomy? Can writers really have autonomy when the teacher has control in the classroom of what they're supposed to write and how they're supposed to write it? I wonder sometimes when I ask students what they think they've done well or what they're proud of because it's in this frame that I've set up in the classroom, that they don't really have that freedom of choice. 

[00:21:21] I think autonomy isn't about students being left alone. It's about, uh, trying to empower them with the tools and the strategies and giving them the feedback which will enable them to take control. So, autonomy is the goal. It's not independent from support. But support has to be given in a way that gives them ownership of the revisions they need to make and the decision making they need to decide on.

[00:21:54] One thing that you mentioned earlier, Peter, was generated feedback. So AI generated feedback or auto- generated feedback. That's sort of a new development, shall we say, in in terms of where feedback can come from. Where do we go next? How can we keep the principles that we've been discussing in this age of feedback taking a totally new form?

[00:22:14] Well just related to the point of autonomy. I think that AI is drastically reducing students' autonomy responsibility and ownership. A lot of about what writing is and autonomy is developing their, their own voice and their own style. Because of AI is so easy, it does so much for the, for students and for us that it might be reducing that autonomy. But in terms of feedback, way more positive about AI feedback because I think it's really amazing. The quality of feedback from ai.

[00:22:45] Now, if you give it the right prompt and you ask it the right question and you assign it a role and a context, and you give plenty of input, if you include the rubric. And you write a really good prompt, you're gonna get really, really effective feedback. And to be honest, it's, it's way better than my feedback.

[00:23:04] And I spent a lot of my career trying to get really good at giving feedback. And now AI has surpassed that. It's identifying things which I never knew. When I'm sitting with my students to discuss the AI feedback, thinking that I'm gonna add to it, I, I just don't, I just sit there in awe at the amazing quality of the feedback. And it's more about me asking the student how they're gonna incorporate that feedback into their writing.
[00:23:29] So that's something that you implement consciously as part of your teaching.

[00:23:33] Oh yeah, because that's my new role . I feel my role now is to sit with them and, and they've got to decipher the feedback. They've got to interpret it, they've got to make sure there's not biases or, you know, incorrect feedback. But doesn't make many mistakes. I mean, people say AI is biased, but it's not, AI is not biased. The training data is biased. It's, humans are biased who have trained the AI tool. Where I work at Zayed University, we've been experimenting with a few, bought, AI tools. I'm using Studiosity with my class and pretty powerful too. There's a lot of money being invested in it, and I, I think it's the way of the future,

[00:24:12] That's really interesting. I've never heard of Studiosity, but I've written it down. 

[00:24:16] Cadmus, Feedback Fruits. There's a hundred in every day purely for feedback. 

[00:24:24] I have a question, Peter. Don't students find this bit overwhelming or demoralizing receiving feedback from AI? I mean, is there empathy in this process? 

[00:24:37] That's a, that's a really interesting question. And you know, my students, they didn't have AI at high school so that the AI is totally a new thing for them. But as introduce my students to it, I train them how to write good prompts. When they get the feedback and they see the quality, they go, oh wow, this is quite good. Because in the beginning they just write gimme feedback on my essay and, and that's not gonna do it. So they have to write a really good prompt.

[00:25:04] Once they know how to write a good prompt is really good, they look at it and go, oh, this is really good. It's not that I feel like I'm out of the picture, but, I'm not always that needed as maybe as I was before. It's just a, a role that AI can do, I think, better than me, so I let it do it sometimes. 

[00:25:22] One more question. Do your students expect AI to provide corrections?

[00:25:28] Another good question. , They know that AI can just correct it , or just generate the whole text from the very beginning. They know that, um, the tools like Studiosity and Grammarly, don't actually do that. They don't actually provide the answer. It's like the Socratic method where the AI tool will probe and ask questions and say things like, how could you reword that? What do you mean by this? And the student can say, can you, you know, reword the sentence, I'm having a bit of difficulty with it, but it won't just reword the whole thing for them. And I like that. So I think that's what you are getting at Angeliki is , it's a teacher. It's not just a. A generator of text. 

[00:26:05] Monalisha, Madhu, both of you have been doing a huge amount of writing. Monalisha, you've just finished your PhD and Madhu, you've been a postdoc for a while now. To what extent do you use AI to get feedback on your writing? Is that something you've explored?

[00:26:20] I have used Grammarly for quite some time, I first write it myself and then revise it Do with Grammarly in the beginning, it might not help me to generate my ideas, improve my writing. So what I do is I. prepare multiple drafts and then revise. And then finally at the end I go through Grammarly for feedback. So that is how I'm using Grammarly for editing purpose only. But if students start with from the very beginning, I personally think, it might hamper their writing skill a little bit.

[00:27:01] Monalisha, how about you?

[00:27:03] I definitely agree with this viewpoint. I have used it myself and like Peter just said, he is doing an expert mediated implementation of the AI tools. And when Madhu is using it, she's using it as an expert writer. But she rightly pointed out that if a student at the undergraduate level, or even at postgraduate level, if they started from the very beginning, there are definitely, you know, there, there's bound to be some damages in their writing skills at a later stage.

[00:27:38] But, uh, one of the key words that I would like to bring in, again, from what Peter earlier said, is defensive. Students are very often defensive about what they're writing accepting the fact that there are problems in your writing sheds a very different kind of light on you as a researcher and writer. So even with the instructor who is definitely there to, to help you with your writing, students just do not like to admit that, you know, they, they are having problems. If you just ask them, are you, know, the ultimate academic writer, I'm sure then nobody would agree.

[00:28:22] But if you ask them what are the problems you are facing? Or can you show me your writing? And then there are some problems that might be there. So why I'm saying this is these are the same, uh, problems or, you know, inhibitions that come when you, when the students are using AI and when they implement the instructors or AI feedback, they tend to choose to implement and choose not to implement these feedback based on their defense mechanism how they have accepted their own, limitations. So I think defense is a strong point. We, we should keep it at the center of these discussions. 

[00:29:06] One thing that I've been thinking about as you've all been talking about what makes feedback effective is whether it's AI, whether it's the teacher questioning the student, whether it's the student questioning themselves. It sounds like feedback always has to be some kind of collaborative process. It has to be a a dialogue or a kind of bouncing off of ideas. Is that fair to say?

[00:29:28] Yeah. Feedback is kind of always a dialogic process. So in the beginning, uh, we used to think like it's transmission from the teacher. Teacher read the student work and they provide some feedback on that and it ends there. So we earlier also talking about how we can make it, we can create a situation where students can utilise feedback. It's a collaborative process. It's a dialogic process, so the loop should be completed and students should be engaged with the feedback.

[00:30:02] So to, to ensure that engagement as we mentioned earlier. there should be actionable guidelines. So feedback providers should pay attention to students' affective needs, and as Monalisha was saying earlier, to avoid that defensiveness. So if we just want to, you know, establish our point as a teacher if students want to stick to their point, it doesn't lead to us anywhere so there should be kind of alignment, uh, between feedback providers and students as it does. By doing that, maybe we can, uh, avoid defense. And then in course of time that develops feedback literacy because feedback is about, writing is always a process of rewriting. 

[00:30:56] I want to ask you a kind of forward looking question, not to finish this discussion, but to draw the episode to a close because I'm sure people listening are gonna have lots more questions to ask you. But what I want to know is what questions do you have now about feedback on academic writing as students, as teachers, as researchers? What are you looking at now? What do you think the future of feedback is?

[00:31:19] For me, feedback lies at the center of the whole teaching learning process. If students make any progress in their learning, I personally do think it's through feedback.

[00:31:33] I think feedback can be related more with a little bit of scientific process. In academic writing we are essentially you know, doing this scientific writing . Students come with a lot of subjective writing experiences, And they have a very different kind of ideas of writing as opposed to academic writing where they have done a lot of prose writing, poetry writing, and lot of varieties of writing, and, but they have had very little experiences both reading and writing sciences. So when we, especially at the earlier stages when we are giving feedback, I think we need to rope in the idea of questioning and answering, like I said earlier, and as part of the whole scientific process into it then autonomy has to be developed.

[00:32:30] What I wonder about is what the teacher's role in giving feedback is gonna be in the future. I was really interested in what Peter was saying earlier. Will AI replace teacher's role as a feedback provider or will teacher just be a facilitator? Can students develop a dialogic relationship, let's say with feedback provided by ai?

[00:32:58] The question that, that I'm very much interested in, apart from the one that Angeliki here just mentioned, which is a good one. I, I wonder if academic writing is, is dead, if, if, if AI can generate any type of text, is there any point teaching our students to write? And I've been grappling with that for about two and a half years now, and I really think it is not dead yet. And I still think it's really important to to teach students to write because writing is learning and students learn by writing, and I think that whole process of writing over a extended period of time, reading, researching, synthesizing, changing ideas, changing your mind. I think that's about, that's a key part of learning. 

[00:33:45] I've been reading an article by Maggie Charles. She notes a decline in research dedicated specifically to academic writing. This is possibly due to the recent focus on speaking assessments because of AI. I, also don't think academic writing is dying. Maybe it's declining or maybe it's, uh, evolving or trying to find a way to revive. I'm not sure, but, I know that it's still dynamic. It is dynamic despite all the new challenges.

[00:34:22] Like you said, Sanchia, not the end of the discussion on feedback on academic writing, so if you have some other ideas, feel free to contact us.
[00:34:30] If you'd like to share a comment, suggestion or an insight into something that we've talked about, please send us an email or voice note at podcast@baleap.org, but you can also get in touch through our YouTube channel, @AllThingsEAP. Thank you so much for listening to this episode We really hope you've enjoyed it and that you've found something interesting or useful in it. and we hope that you can join us for the next episode. 

[00:34:56] Take care. Bye-bye.