Investigating the impact of teacher feedback on content revisions in EFL students’ writing by the automated tracking approach

Teacher feedback plays an important role in motivating students who learn English as a Foreign Language (EFL) to revise and improve their writing. Investigating how EFL students revise their writing in response to various types of teacher feedback has long received research attention. However, such investigation is human dependent, which requires considerable time and effort, limiting its application to a wide range of EFL writing classes in practice. To address this issue, this study was designed to adopt a systematic and automated approach to investigate the impact of different types of teacher feedback on the content revisions of EFL students at a larger scale. A total of 114 EFL undergraduate students and 3 experienced English teachers from three universities participated in this study. The writing draft and final writing of students and the written feedback from teachers were collected as data and were entered into an automated tracking system for analysis. The analytical results indicate that constructive criticism and imperative appeared to be most effective in triggering content revisions, advice could have a comparable effect, and that question was least effective. The automated analysis would be helpful to teachers in making informed adjustments to their feedback and instructional strategies to better support student revisions. Copyright © 2021 Springer Nature Switzerland AG.