Interrelations of representations of academic writing and professors’ written feedback

Abstract

This paper shows some interrelations of representations of academic writing and its teaching, and the discourse strategies (Menéndez, 2000) adopted by lecturers and professors when giving written feedback. On the basis of a corpus of 30 interviews to professors and 184 samples of written feedback by the same professors, we have identified four representations about writing and a set of eight discourse strategies, which are first outlined here. Second, on the basis of two cases, two of the representations are described in detail, using discourse analysis tools based on Systemic Functional Linguistics. Additionally, the same two cases allow us to examine the strategies adopted by professors when assessing the texts produced by their students. The results show that those professors who represent writing as a tool used in material processes and who assign their students and themselves the role of Actors use strategies to feedback written production, under the form of instructions and questions. In contrast, when the prevailing representation is that in which writing is associated with a phenomenon in which the professor is a mere observer, feedback is mainly provided by using strategies whose purpose is expressing an evaluation about the correctness or incorrectness of an answer.