مجید نعمتی

With numerous variables mediating the way learners interact with teacher corrective feedback (TCF), one may not comment on its efficacy before such intervening variables are adequately addressed and learners’ attendance to TCF is ensured. Among those variables, motivation is one of the most prominent ones largely affecting the degree to which students benefit from TCF. Draft-Specific Scoring (DSS), a scoring system giving learners’ a reason to notice TCF by rewarding them for the revisions they make through a flexible system of scoring, was implemented to investigate if TCF could help learners improve their use of subordinate clauses. To do so, two groups of students studying English Language Literature at the University of Tehran, consisting of 55 participants who were randomly assigned as treatment and control groups, were studied. The results of the gain analysis indicated an improvement for both groups over time in the total number and accuracy of the subordination clauses used; however, the treatment group significantly outperformed the control group. While the two groups did not differ in their use of noun clauses, the DSS group was found to outperform the non-DSS group regarding the adverb and adjective clauses. This indicates that motivation to attend to teacher feedback is of great importance if TCF is to be effective.

Learning-oriented assessment (LOA) seeks to support instruction by providing information about students ’ current learning conditions and their ultimate performance. This study scrutinizes the application of LOA in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) writing classes within Iranian language institutes. In addition, the current study examined the participants’ writing traits using the researchers-developed writing traits questionnaire during the implementation of LOA. Sixty upper-intermediate students (male & female) in two intact classes at a language institute in Tabriz, Iran, were taken as the participants. One of these classes was randomly picked as the control and the other one as the experimental group. During the treatment, learners of the experimental group carried out the relevant writing tasks based on the principles of LOA. On the other hand, the control group adopted the teacher-centered approach. 120 IELTS writing task 2 samples were collected and scored by using a scoring rubric (Wang & Liao, 2008) before and after the LOA treatment. To realize the differences in the mean scores of students in the control group and the experimental group, an independent sample t-test was used. The findings showed that the students of the experimental group benefited vastly from multiple drafting, self, and peer-evaluation, sharing learning goals with teachers and each other, and using feedforward techniques instead of feedback. The results might provide both theory and pedagogy implications for syllabus designers and language teachers with valuable guidelines on improving writing assessment in IELTS writing courses.