Exploring Chinese students’ perspectives of and preferences towards formative feedback approaches on written EAP work

Feedback is an integral element in the teacher-student relationship leading to improvement and academic success, and also for encouraging learner autonomy. This has led to a variety of approaches for delivering feedback, all of which have strengths but questions remain as to how students perceive their effectiveness towards improving specific aspects of written coursework. Five feedback approaches (written comments, in-text annotations, checklist, general class feedback, and individual tutorials) are examined in this paper through a review of existing literature and a survey on student preferences. Quantitative data was gathered from eighty-six first-year EAP students at an EMI university in China on their perspectives and preferences. Statistical analysis indicates that results generally support the understanding of the current literature with a preference for individual one-to-one tutorials.