“The Correctness of Corrective Feedback” : A Qualitative Content Analysis of Four Support Materials from theSwedish National Agency for Education

Sammanfattning: Several decades of research into the effectiveness of corrective feedback on ESL writing have resulted in the emergence of a consensus on a number of best practices. This study aims to investigate what recommendations the Swedish National Agency for Education provides upper secondary English teachers to use when responding to students’ writing, and if these recommendations are aligned with current research on corrective feedback. Through a content analysis, I examine four support resource materials from the Swedish National Agency for Education explicitly aimed at helping teachers with using feedback. The findings of this study show that the four resources from Skolverket depict a unified perception of what type of feedback teachers should provide: the feedback needs to be didactically considered, taking the learning goals of the syllabus, the individual student’s learning needs, and the level of detail it should contain in consideration both before and during the responding. It also needs to be indirect so that it does not constrain students’ writing style, yet it needs to provide constructive explanations so the students are not left confused by the feedback. The findings further show that for the most part, the four resources and the research are aligned when it comes to the content and the focus of the feedback, however, they differ in areas regarding how extensive and explanatory the feedback needs to be.