STUDENTS REACTIONS TO TEACHER COMMENTS - AN EXPLORATORY-STUDY

Current scholarship indicates that most writing students read and make use of teachers' written comments on their drafts and find some types of comments more helpful than others. But the research is unclear a?b out which comments students find most useful and why. This article pre sents the results of a survey of 142 first-year college writing studen ts' perceptions about teacher comments on a writing sample. A 40-item questionnaire was used to investigate students' reactions to three var iables of teacher response: focus, specificity, and mode. The survey f ound that these college students seemed equally interested in getting responses on global matters of content, purpose, and organization as o n local matters of sentence structure, wording, and correctness, but w ere wary of negative comments about ideas they had already expressed i n their text. It also found that these students favored detailed comme ntary with specific and elaborated comments, but they did not like com ments that sought to control their writing or that failed to provide h elpful criticism for improving the writing. They most preferred commen ts that provided advice, employed open questions, or included explanat ions that guided revision.