Foreign Language students’ perceptions of a reflective approach to text correction

Abstract

This paper presents a teaching model developed to encourage second-year university students of Italian to reflect upon their writing process and to consider error correction as an active source of learning. While composing their own autobiography, students were encouraged to draw on teacher indirect feedback in order to self-correct errors, to incorporate this feedback in the redrafting of text, and to reflect on their use of linguistic forms. It is argued that this combination of teaching strategies – which forms the model explored in this paper – plays a crucial role in assisting students to take responsibility for their own learning. To develop this argument, this paper firstly outlines the academic background and the teaching context from which the model was developed. Secondly, it describes the key components of the model and their application in a second-year Italian course at Griffith University. In particular, it explores a reflective approach to text correction, which combines direct and indirect feedback and aims to foster independence from teacher intervention and reflection on learning strategies. Thirdly, it analyses student perceptions of this model in order to clarify its educational value in a foreign language (FL) learning context. It concludes by identifying pedagogical implications for future applications