EFL Teachers’ Reconstruction of Student-Writers’ Intentions in Erroneous Sentences: The Role of Context

Writing is an important skill and a valuable part of any language course, and feedback is an important aspect of teaching writing. Teachers customarily give feeedback, or write comments on the students’ papers to revise their writing, and, at times, they embark on reconstructing and providing the correct form of the segment of the discourse that they feel needs repairing. However, they have not been very successful in this undertaking. To find out the extent to which teachers correctly understand writers’ intended meaning when providing them with revision feedabck (as well the function of context in this process), this study employed nine university teachers who were given thirty nine context–bound erroneous sentences to reconstruct, taken from writing samples of thirteen students. In the second phase of the study, however, six teachers were given the same thirty nine context-free sentences to interpret. The aim was to measure the extent to which teachers can correctly unearth students’ intentions from the idiosyncractic utterances and, at the same time, to measure the effect of context in the meaning-discovery process. The results showed that approximately 60 % of teachers failed to reconstruct correctly the students’ erroneous sentences. The results also revealed that the role of context was downplayed in poorly-knitted discouse produced by students. Further findings are discussed in the paper.