Interpersonal aspect of written feedback: a community college students’ perspective

Despite the bulk of studies on written feedback (WF) in higher education in the past decades, the majority of them have focused on written corrective feedback. On the other hand, WF research on students’ perception of teacher WF is scant. Among those studies which focus on L2 students’ perception, the participants are mostly secondary school and university students. Different from existing feedback research which examined students’ perception of the focus, type, and specificity of WF, this article reports on a group of L2 community college students’ perception of interpersonal factors which potentially affect their response to teacher WF. Adopting a grounded theory methodology, thematic analysis of data collected from 93 open-ended questionnaires and two rounds of interviews indicated four prominent themes including two relational factors (students’ impression on teachers, student-teacher relationship) and two mediating factors (students’ trust in teachers’ professionalism, students’ responsibilities).