Individual face-to-face feedback and the Saudi EFL learners: Evaluating enhancement of writing skills

This research analyzed Saudi undergraduate students’ writing before and after individual face-to-face feedback. The intervention was individual written feedback on Saudi EFL students' paragraph writing. The participants were 31 EFL Saudi students exposed to a pre and post-test across six criteria that targeted to evaluate their writing with individual corrective feedback from the teacher. The intervention was one semester long. The study reported that individual corrective feedback plays an important role in developing students' writing skills. Thirty-one students participated in the writing tasks. All the participants had studied English as a foreign language being enrolled in the writing course at Qassim University College of Language and Translation. The median age of the participants was 20 years and the group was homogenous in terms of years of learning English, residence type (rural/ urban), GPA scores in the past two semesters, and gender (all males). Though the initial group strength was 31, in the post tests, 8 answers were repeated, so the author deleted them from the analysis. Thus, the actual participants were 23 students. The researcher got an oral consent from the students to participate in the study. The study clearly established that individual face-to-face corrective feedback played an important role in developing students’ paragraph writing skills.