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May Alharbi

Department: English
Discipline: Education
Research Centre/Unit: Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL)

Project Summary

Teaching in an English as a Foreign Language (EFL) classrooms is an exciting area to study because the majority of EFL learners tend to encounter challenges when asked to compose logical academic essays. In Saudi Arabia, EFL students are required to complete a series of writing task, i.e., single-paragraph exercises, summaries, and essays (Alharabi, 2016). These written tasks present a challenge for many college students who find it difficult to compose well-reasoned academic essays (Ahmad, 2018). This difficulty could be an outcome of these learners' lack of exposure to varying types of feedback that EFL teachers are able to provide to EFL students (Alharabi, 2016). One of the main techniques for addressing this issue is by providing various types of feedback to the EFL students in Saudi Arabia, the type of feedback provided is not usually beneficial and useful. However, there has been no study conducted in the context of Saudi Arabia to address such a gap.

Accordingly, my research aims to investigate the impact of providing feedback to EFL writers in Saudi Arabia. This will be done by exposing students to two kinds of feedback, as suggested by the scholars Elola and Oskoz (2016), as well as Hyland and Hyland (2019): indirect feedback and direct feedback. The findings of my project will have benefits for teaching English composition both within and outside Saudi Arabia. Additionally, this study’s results could also be used in the teaching of first language (L1) composition.

The selection of my research comes from my personal experience and interests, as I have been studying different aspects of EFL teaching methodology in Saudi Arabia for my assignments. Another important reason is the lack of in-depth research on the impact of EFL feedback on EFL writers, generally and more specifically, in the context of Saudi Arabia.

References

Ahmad, I. (2018). Teacher Cognition and Grammar Teaching in the Saudi Arabian Context. English Language Teaching, 11(12), 45-57.

Alharbi, S. (2016). Effect of teachers’ written corrective feedback on Saudi EFL university students’ writing achievements. International Journal of Linguistics, 8(5), 15-29.

Elola, I., & Oskoz, A. (2016). Supporting second language writing using multimodal feedback. Foreign Language Annals, 49(1), 58-74.

Hyland, K., & Hyland, F. (2019). Feedback in second language writing: Contexts and issues. Cambridge: Cambridge university press.

Supervisory Team

Dr. Philip Durrant

Dr. Nasser Mansour