Under the impact of the process approach in teaching writing, teacher written feedback is perceived as a comprehensive evaluation, guidance, and facilitator of teacher-student dialogues rather than grammar correction. For these reasons, writing teachers are encouraged to provide balanced feedback on both global and local issues catering for the needs of the students. Previous studies on students' and teacher's perception through questionnaires and interviews typically found teachers overemphasize local feedback, but students also showed preference towards such feedback. Working to update the existing research, this study investigated how ESL students and teachers perceive written feedback within the local setting of the ESL writing program at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). A set of questionnaire was administered to elicit information if the students and teachers perceive global skills to be more important than local skills, if the amount of feedback is satisfactory, if they agree on issues regarding comprehension and revision, and if their general preferences and attitudes towards written feedback match. The results indicate that both the students and teachers considered global writing skills to be more important than local ones; that the amount of feedback on both areas was satisfactory although local feedback might be lacking; that the overall comprehension and revision was fairly successful with language and communication being the biggest barriers. Also, the students and teachers had a matched preference towards written feedback, however, they interpreted the lack of full revision differently: teachers attributed it to inadequate performance while students thought it was mostly normal. Finally, both groups of participants realized the existence of a gap in their understanding, but only from their own perspective: the students claimed their papers misread by the teachers, and the teachers claimed that students did not recognize errors.
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