2.3 Reliability of Corrective Feedback

To investigate the consistency and the systematicity of the corrections, summaries written by first year female students at the same junior college (N = 29) who were not in this study were used. The students' English proficiency was approximately the same as the participants in this study. The instructor was asked to correct their summaries as he had corrected those written by the participants in the study.

The students were first provided with several different graded readers at the 600 word level, which was considered to be easily within their reading competence, and were asked to choose one to read. All consisted of a short story of about 2000 to 2500 words in length. Students read for about 15 to 20 minutes. They then wrote a summary of the story they read in English. Students had plenty of time to write the summary, about 90 minutes including the reading time. These conditions were thus similar to the conditions used in the actual study.

The instructor corrected the same papers twice, with the second grading occurring one month after the first. As shown in table 1, the instructor corrected fewer errors the first time (267) than in the second (470). The kinds of corrections made, however, were very similar, confirming that correction was consistent (for additional details, see Mason, 2003).

Table 1. Types of Correction at Two Different Times

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