W 094 F

Introduction
In my first year at the Janus Pannonius University I was required to attend a writing course, which was called Writing and Research Skills. During this course the students were required to write several essays, and these essays were collected in a booklet, which was called Portfolio. Besides writing the essays, they had to read William Zinsser’s works, and each other’s essays as well. The last task of the course to fulfill is writing a Research Paper. The students were given several topics from which they could choose.

I’ve chosen to survey feedback types, because I’ve always wanted to know if there was a difference between the feedback of a native speaker of English and of a Hungarian speaker of English. I thought it would be interesting to find out whether there is a difference. I expect to find some, because in the past I got different kinds of feedback from different teachers. Sometimes it was long with lots of details, then it was short, clear, and easy to understand. During this recent task, I tried to look for something specific, something realistic. The answer I’m looking for is: Is there a difference between the feedback of a native American English teacher and a non-native teacher of English. I don’t yet know, but hopefully by the end I’ll manage to find it out.

Method
Firstly, I read Peter Grundy and Vivian Li’s work on different kinds of feedback. After that I interviewed two teachers at the school. One of the teachers was a native American (NS), and the other one was a Hungarian teacher of English language (NNS). I wrote a questionnaire that included eight questions, and I asked the teachers to answer them. After having the answers I analyzed them, and I tried to come up with a solution. In my questionnaire I asked the teachers about their ways of giving feedback to the students. I asked them about on the evaluation of students, about the marks they gave, about the time and timing of returning the papers, and the encouragement in the feedback. The eight questions were easy to answer, so it didn’t take up lots of time to fill my questionnaire. The two teachers could answer them immediately, I didn’t have to wait for the answers. I thought that those questions would help me to find the answer for my main research question: Whether there is a difference between the feedback of a NS teacher and a NNS teacher, and if there is then what is it?

Results

1. How do you evaluate your students’ writing?

To my first question I got almost the same answer. Both the NS teacher and the NNS told me that they made the corrections on the paper. The difference was that the NS teacher said that she corrected the mistakes and it counted in the evaluation, whereas the NNS teacher said that she looked for mistakes in the content, and that counted more. She corrected the grammatical mistakes, but in the evaluation it was not that important.

2. What marks do you give?

To my second question the answer again was almost the same, although there was a slight difference. They gave the same marks (1-5), but only because this is the standard in Hungary. If they had had a choice the NS teacher would have given different marks. She said that she preferred the method they used in America (1-10), but she is required to evaluate the students the same way as the other teachers at the university.

3. How long does it take to correct the works?

There was a big difference between the answers to my third question. For the NS teacher it takes only 15 minutes to correct a paper, whereas for the NNS teacher the same task takes an hour.

4. Do you keep the date of returning the papers?

To the next question I got the same answer. They both try to keep the date of returning a paper. They both try to correct the written assignments for the next lesson. The NS teacher has a different method. She makes the students read the texts aloud, and corrects it immediately. Then she takes them home to check it once more.

5. This semester, during one course, how many written assignments did you give?

To this question I got almost the same answers. The only difference was between the timing. The NS teacher gives written assignments during the course, while the NNS teacher gives two assignments at the end of the course, as a final task to complete.

6. Why did you give two written assignments?

The reasons that the teachers gave me were different for this question. The NNS teacher said that the reason for having the students write more than once during a course was that this method seemed to be more useful both for the students and the teacher as well. The NS teacher simply had had this method for years, and she wanted to stick with it. She said that it had worked in the past.

7. How do you encourage your students in your evaluation?

The NS teacher said that she made comments on the paper, and tried to emphasize the best features in the written assignments. The NNS teacher also made comments on the paper, and tried to encourage the students in those comments.

8. Is there a difference in the evaluation of a student when he/she writes his/her first written assignment or when you already know the person?

The answer of the NS teacher to this question was that in her evaluation she considered the improvement of the student as well as the participation during the class. So it was important for her to know the student to be able to give proper evaluation. The other teacher gives the assignments at the end of the course, so by that time she knows the students’ skills.

Conclusion

When I got these answers I tried to look for the differences between the NS and the NNS teachers. Although I found quite a few, but those differences weren’t that significant as I expected. The methods of the two teachers’ differed, but only slightly, and there should be other surveys to determine whether these differences come from the nationality of the two teachers. The differences may come from the fact that they are two different persons, with different ideas. I think the same result may come up if I observed two native speaker teachers, or two Hungarian speaking English teachers. Although what I found out was that the NS teacher wasn’t that strong on the students as the Hungarian teacher, and we could get an answer for this if we did another research on that.

This task made me think of other possibilities on researching this subject. Maybe my next paper will be about the reason why those two teachers had different methods, and where the methods come from. Although I could not find significant differences between the feedback of these two teachers, I think maybe this could be researched in order to find the reason. I enjoyed doing this task, and I would like to find out more about facts that are related to this task.