Role of ESL Teachers’ Feedback in Improving Students’ Writing Skills: A Case Study in City School Bahawalpur

Abstract

Feedback from English as Second Language (ESL) teachers is essential for improving students writing skills. Effective feedback provides students with specific, constructive insights into their writing, helping them to identify errors and correct them, improve their language use, and develop their overall writing competence. The current study addresses the evaluation and assessment of the changes in students’ competence in writing skills at the upper primary level in the English language, focusing on the impact of ESL teachers’ feedback on narrative and recount writing and giving recommendations for effective feedback to ESL teachers. The targeted population was the male and female students from City School Bahawalpur Campus. A sample of 20 students was taken using the convenient sampling method from the whole population of 120 students. A sample of the City School System, grade 5, was easily accessible, for which the study aimed at analyzing the impact of ESL teachers’ feedback on students’ narrative writing skills. An achievement test consisting of different creative writing tasks was developed to assess the students’ competency and ability in creative writing skills, such as narrative writing, by providing them the rubric to make them informed learners. Students were given the autonomy of planning their writing skills based on the provided rubric, which included originality of ideas, creativity, cohesion, coherence, syntax, content relevance, story structure, and word count. Experimental research was conducted by providing the students with a pretest. The content was timely checked and marked based on the provided rubric; constructive feedback was given to help students understand the areas for improvement and to take ownership of their learning process in composing narrative. To assess the efficacy of the provided feedback, a post-test was conducted on the same sample of students after 15-days’ gap. Data was analyzed by a simple statistical method by comparing the results of pretests and posttests. The findings indicate that constructive feedback from the ESL teacher had a significant positive impact on the students' narrative writing skills and word count. A majority of students demonstrated marked improvements in various aspects of their writing, including narrative and recount words. Feedback was particularly effective in enhancing the use of descriptive language.