The effects of integrating teacher-student conferencing with teacher-written feedback on the writing skills of first-year EFL undergraduate students in Ethiopia

Teacher-student writing conferencing is widely recognized as an effective feedback technique for enhancing students’ writing skills; nevertheless, it has not been implemented in Ethiopia yet. Research on its effect within the Ethiopian educational context also remains scarce. To address this gap and introduce the technique into writing instruction in Ethiopia, the present study investigated the effects of integrating teacher-student writing conferencing with teacher-written feedback on Ethiopian students’ paragraph writing skills. To this end, quasi-experimental design was employed. Two intact groups from Hawassa University were selected and assigned to experimental group (n = 31) and comparison group (n = 31). The experimental group was taught paragraph writing through providing one-on-one teacher-student writing conferences integrated with teacher-written feedback for 14 weeks; however, the comparison group was taught via offering teacher-written feedback alone for the same duration. The data were collected through pre- and post-writing tests and analyzed using mean, standard deviation, an independent samples t-test, and a paired samples t-test. Results displayed that the experimental group significantly outperformed the comparison group in content, organization, and mechanics (p < .05) with effect sizes 0.80, 0.81, and 0.55 respectively. However, no significant difference was found between the two groups in terms of language use and vocabulary, indicating that teacher-student writing conferencing may prioritize high-order writing competencies like content over low-order skills such as language usage and vocabulary. Hence, university EFL instructors are recommended to integrate one-on-one teacher-student writing conferencing with teacher-written feedback in their writing classrooms to improve their students’ content, organization, and mechanics, but use either of the feedback technique to optimize language use and vocabulary.