A Corpus-based Study of Teachers' Feedback Commentaries on College Students' English Assignments

According to Leki (1990) and Hyland & Hyland (2006), written feedback could offer potential value in facilitating students' future writing, and is one of the most popular approaches tutors used to communicate or interact with their students. This is because the feedback could offer a lot of informational comments, which could facilitate the students' writing ability and provide the opportunity for teachers to interact with students (Hyland, 2003). In this circumstance, feedback is generally acknowledged as pedagogically useful to offer informational reactions and advice to facilitate the academic essay writing (Cohen & Cavalcanti, 1990; Hedgcok & Lefkoeitz, 1994; Hendricks & Quinn, 2000). Besides the informational meaning, feedback is also regarded as the opportunity for teachers to express their "stance and beliefs" about writing and terminology in the academic writing (Hyland & Hyland, 2001, p.187). As for teachers, the response to the students' writing is more than the form or content correction; it includes the "delicate social interactions" that could boost or destroy the effectiveness of the feedback and the pedagogical meaning (Hyland & Hyland, 2006, p.187). For students, feedback is also one of the most favorite and acceptable methods in their learning process (Tee, 2014).