ELTIN JOURNAL: p-ISSN 2339-1561 Journal of English Language Teaching in Indonesia e–ISSN 2580-7684 23 STUDENTS’ EMOTIONAL RESPONSES TOWARD TEACHER’S DIRECT WRITTEN CORRECTIVE FEEDBACK Cindy Fatika Sari*1, Maman Suryaman2, Elih Sutisna Yanto3 11710631060046@student.unsika.ac.id, 2maman.suryaman@fkip.unsika.ac.id, 3elih.sutisna@fkip.unsika.ac.id 1,2,3UNIVERSITAS SINGAPERBANGSA KARAWANG ABSTRACT This study aims to find out what emotional responses students after receiving to Direct Written Corrective Feedback (DWCF) from the teacher in their writing assignments. The research design used in this research is a narrative case study design. The respondents of this study were the students of Senior high school in Karawang. To collect students’ emotional response data, semi-structured interviews and students' reflective journals are used. Then, collected data were analyzed by using thematic analysis. The results revealed that students’ emotional responses toward teacher’s direct written corrective feedback include positive and negative responses. The positive responses were happy (6), satisfaction (5), motivated (3). While, negative responses were surprised (1), disappointed (2), dissatisfaction (1). Based on these findings, it can be concluded that most of students responded the teacher’s feedback positively. The reason why most of students gave the positive responses was revealed by the result of interview that students feel happy because the feedback that the teacher provides is very useful. Keywords: Direct written corrective feedback, students’ emotional responses, narrative text A. INTRODUCTION Corrective feedback (hereafter CF) is a language correction or error correction that has been much debated for the last 15 years. Corrective Feedback is feedback that is negative and contains student error correction (Ellis, 2009). Despite research on corrective feedback being undertaken, there remains no broad agreement on what errors should be corrected and how to correct them (Banaruee & Askari, 2016). Since the 1970s much researchers have been doing about corrective feedback to function and have CF on written learning. Although research on corrective feedback has been done a lot of time, there is still a lot of difference information about corrective feedback. Truscott (2007) claims that written corrective feedback to failures is clear and dramatic. In 1996 he also published an article on "the case against language correction in class written L2" and he also said that grammar corrections should be eliminated in written courses. A research conducted by Semke (1984) reports that there is no evidence that language errors can help students' writing accuracy. However, evidence stating that written corrective feedback (WCF) is effective in increasing the accuracy of students’ writing (Bitchener & Storch,2016; Rummel, & Bitchener, 2015; Ellis, 2009). mailto:1nita.seraphine@unpar.ac.id mailto:1nita.seraphine@unpar.ac.id mailto:maman.suryaman@fkip.unsika.ac.id mailto:elih.sutisna@fkip.unsika.ac.id Sari, Suryaman & Yanto: Students’ Emotional Responses Toward … 24 Research on written corrective feedback both direct and indirect has been conducted and some of these studies address students' responses to written corrective feedback. Student responses in receiving feedback can affect the effectiveness of the feedback given. One of the results of research conducted by Mahfoods (2017) found eight components of students' emotional response to written corrective feedback, including acceptance of written feedback, rejection of feedback, surprise, happiness, dissatisfaction, disappointment, statements, and satisfaction. In helping and improving language accuracy, students must respond to WCF given by their teacher. There is research that shows the possibility of a mismatch between the feedback given by the teacher and the feedback that students expect (Ping, Pin, Wee, & Hwee Nah, 2003). This is because students play an important role in their learning achievement and become active recipients of WCF. Even in teaching writing in language classes, many teachers recommend giving focused WCF to reduce negative student responses. Discussions about the effectiveness of Direct Written Corrective Feedback (hereafter DWCF) have been carried out. But there are differences in results shown by previous research. A study conducted by Banaruee, et al. (2018) that Direct corrective feedback has a significant impact on written language learning and it is effective at encouraging students to understand and correct their writing errors. In contrast to Shintani and Ellis (2009), direct written corrective feedback is not sufficient to enable low proficiency students to help them understand and correct their writing errors. Although much-supporting evidence has emerged, this has made teachers confused to distinguish specific ways to help students correct their writing errors. In a previous study conducted by Mahfoods (2017) entitled "I feel disappointed": The emotional response of EFL university students to teacher-written feedback was carried out using grounded theory. Student written texts, hard thinking protocols, and semi-structured interviews involving eight students and two teachers indicated that the students felt surprised, happy and disappointed. Therefore, research on student responsibility after receiving feedback on their writing is important to be studied more deeply. Based on some of these considerations, the authors were interested in conducting research that reviews the "Students’ Emotional Responses Toward Teacher’s Direct Written Corrective Feedback in Senior High School.” This study was conducted to find out what emotional responses students felt when their assignments were given comments and feedback directly by the teacher. The results of this study can assist teachers in finding their various emotional responses after receiving DWCF, choosing what types of writing errors need to be corrected, and knowing the importance of giving DWCF to students. 1. Conceptualizing Corrective Feedback Corrective feedback (CF) is a language correction or error correction that has been much debated since the last 15 years. Corrective Feedback is the feedback that is negative and contains student error correction (Ellis, 2009). Despite research on corrective feedback being undertaken, there remains no broad agreement on what errors should be corrected and how to correct them (Banaruee & Askari, 2016). The research is conducted on the reasons why corrective feedback is necessary, when to do it, what mistakes need to be defended, how to correct, and who should make or provide corrections. The study of corrective feedback has been carried out since the beginning of SLA research, or it can be said that it was centuries ago. However, there is still much debate about the effectiveness of corrective feedback. One researcher who rejects corrective feedback is Truscott. Truscott (2016) claims that CF may ELTIN Journal: Journal of English Language Teaching in Indonesia, Volume 10/No 1, April 2022 25 be able to give students intellectual ability but CF cannot help students to improve their use of language. In contrast, Banaruee, et al. (2018) said that Direct corrective feedback has a significant impact on written for language learning and is effective at encouraging students to understand and correct their writing errors. 2. Focused Direct Written Corrective Feedback in Foreign Languange Writing Written Corrective Feedback (WCF) has two characteristics, namely focused and unfocused, focused written corrective feedback (Focused WCF) can be called selective feedback because error correction is carried out on several types of errors that have been previously selected. While unfocused written corrective feedback (Unfocused WCF) error correction carried out on all parts of the structure (Ellis, 2009). Direct written corrective feedback is the feedback given by the teacher on students' linguistic errors, namely in the form of correct linguistic structures or forms (Daneshvar & Rahimi, 2014). According to Ferris (2010), Direct Written Corrective Feedback (DWCF) is a correction of linguistic forms or structures made by teachers over students' linguistic errors. this includes crossing out unnecessary words/morphemes/phrases, or incorrect structures. Written or spoken meta-linguistic explanations are usually added to the revision. Thus, it can be concluded that DWCF is a linguistic error that teachers give to students in the form of crossing out unnecessary words/morphemes/phrases, or wrong structures. DWCF also usually provides written metalinguistic descriptions. Many teachers focus on providing focused WCF to reduce student negative responses. This is supported by a statement made by Farrokhi (2011), which proves that focused WCF is more effective than unfocused WCF in improving students’ grammar accuracy. 3. Conceptualizing Students’ Emotions Goleman, et.al (2002) asserts that emotion is a feeling or thought that arises as a result of an urge or reaction to external stimuli or the individual himself. Some stimuli that can cause emotions such as social interactions, saying or thinking about emotional events in the past, remembering an event and various physical events. During the 1970s, Paul Ekman identified six basic emotions theory that are universal in nature namely, surprise, happiness, disgust, sadness and anger. Later, he added pride, shame, embarrassment, and excitement. The emotional response of students in the classroom can be observed when there is a stimulus from the teacher such as actions or words. Students' emotions in learning activities are an important component that can help the effectiveness in learning. Shumman & Scherer (2014) contend that emotional includes affective, expressive, motivational, cognitive, and physiological processes. B. METHOD This research used narrative case studies, a qualitative study in which the researcher collects data from an individual or individuals about a specific life event or events that occurred in order to share and retell the story. Narrative Case study is a research instrument that is used to research more deeply about various social and clinical problems, various phenomena in environmental contexts, and understand the stages in a process (Gilgun, 1994). This method was chosen in order to understand more deeply students’ emotional response to the teacher’s feedback and how this feedback could help them overcome their writing mistakes and motivate them to improve their writing skills. The duration of the research lasted from June 21 to June 23, 2021 at one of the senior high schools in Indonesia. Five of 34 eleventh-grade students were recruited to participate in this study. In this study, the authors used semi-structured interviews and student reflective Sari, Suryaman & Yanto: Students’ Emotional Responses Toward … 26 journals to investigate students' emotional responses to written corrective feedback directly from the teacher. After collecting the data, the authors conducted interview transcripts and journal reflections and then classified them according to the category of each response. This research was conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic. Therefore the learning process and data collection were carried out via the internet. Electronic feedback (E- Feedback) is used by the teachers to collect data during pandemic situations. The Electronic feedback used in this study is e-feedback. e-feedback is feedback that is facilitated by a computer or other electronic device. In this study, the type of asynchronous e-feedback was used by the teacher to provide feedback to the students. This feedback is given through comments in Microsoft Word, email, blogs and others after completing their writing assignments (Chapelle & Sauro, 2017). In this research, e-feedback was given in Microsoft Word. Then, student responses were examined using semi-structured interviews and students’ reflective journals, then the results were analyzed using Thematic Analysis as proposed by Braun and Clarke (2006). Due to the pandemic conditions, this research was carried out using the Telegram and Whatsapp platforms. C. FINDINGS AND DISCUSSION The frequency occurrence of Based on the findings selective data analysis and drawing on the thematic analyses of the students’ reflective journals, and semi-structured transcript, two main themes were identified namely students’ positive responses and students’ negative responses as follows in table 1: Table 1. Students’ emotional Responses Emotional response Frequency Percentage Students’ positive responses 1 Happy 6 33% 2 Satisfaction 5 28% 3 Motivated 3 17% Students’ negative responses 1 Surprised 1 6% 2 Dissapointed 2 11% 3 Dissatisfaction 1 6% Total 18 100% The explanation of each finding are described as follows: 1. Students' positive emotional responses a. Happy The positive emotional response obtained from the semi-structured interview is that students say the feedback given by the teacher is easy to understand and makes them happy. After receiving the feedback and reading it, they feel happy because the feedback given by the teacher on their assignment is very useful in helping them correct the mistakes they made. This makes them feel enthusiastic about correcting their writing mistakes and improving their writing skills. They feel that sometimes they complete tasks without knowing what spelling mistakes they made. Therefore, the feedback given by the teacher is very helpful for them. Here's one of the data that shows their happy feelings: ELTIN Journal: Journal of English Language Teaching in Indonesia, Volume 10/No 1, April 2022 27 “Pokoknya kayak misalnya kalo kita dikasih tau benernya seperti apa tuh kayak yang ada rasa tersendiri gitu kak kayak rasa senengnya beda aja gitu hehehe, maaf ya kak kalo misal kurang jelas”. – Student 2, 11th-grader This study shows that students feel various emotional feelings after receiving teacher feedback in their narrative text assignments. Some of them were surprised, sad, and worried about the writing mistakes they made after they saw the many red marks given by the teacher on their writing, but after they saw the feedback given by the teacher and read it carefully, they were happy because they could find where are the errors and their feedback. b. Satisfaction Some of the positive emotional responses obtained from students' reflective journals are that students find DWCF very useful to improve their writing skills. The following is one of the data that shows their positive emotions: “Setelah diberi komentar, saya merasa komentar itu bermanfaat, saya berharap setiap pembelajaran menulis bahasa Inggris guru memberikan komentar agar kita tahu kesalahan dalam menulis, saya sangat termotivasi dan semangat untuk terus berlatih keterampilan menulis.” – Student 3, 11th-grader c. Motivated “Iya, bagi diri saya sendiri itu sangat sangatlah berguna. Iya, karena dengan seperti itu kemungkinan kita untuk mengulangi kesalahan yang sama lebih sedikit karena sudah tau dan paham letak kesalahan dan pembetulan nya seperti apa. Iyaa, sangat-sangat termotivasi dan menumbuhkan rasa ingin bisa, belajar, serta rasa untuk terus berlatih.” – Student 4, 11th-grader The data shows that feedback is very useful for students because it can help them avoid repeating the same mistakes. Besides being useful, the feedback given by the teacher is also very motivating for them to develop their writing skills to be better. 2. Students' negative emotional responses a. Surprised From the results of interviews conducted with five students in one high school in Indonesia through the Whatsapp application, the authors found that students showed various emotional responses, namely positive emotions and negative emotions. One of negative emotional responses shown by students is Surprised by the number of corrections marked in red. It can be seen from the following excerpt: “kalo dari aku kan waktu pertama kali dikasih file yang dikoreksi sama kakaknya itu tuh awalnya kaget kak pas dibuka udah ada tanda merah gitu trus langsung berpikir duh aku banyak banget salahnya ternyata ga dicek satu-satu sih, aku mikirnya gitu kan”. – Student 1, 11th-grader The student said that he was surprised when the teacher corrected and provided feedback on his writing. He felt that his writing was not optimal. Students' surprises like this can be found if the teacher corrects their assignment by putting a red mark on each wrong word. Although the focus on DWCF is given to students, emotional responses such as surprise can be found. Besides being surprised by the number of corrections they got, they were also surprised by the teacher's response to their writing. In this case, many teachers only give grades without Sari, Suryaman & Yanto: Students’ Emotional Responses Toward … 28 correcting or correcting without telling how to correct the writing errors they make. In addition to being surprised, One of the students also felt that the feedback given was difficult to understand in terms of the singular-plural and unclear messages. She thought that she couldn't remember some of the lessons she had learned earlier. b. disappointed The data from students' reflective journal revealed that some students felt disappointment. It can be seen from the following excerpt: “Setelah saya mencoba buat dan di koreksi oleh kak Cindy. Awalnya, saya merasa kecewa dan tidak senang kepada diri saya sendiri karena lumayan banyak yang salah.” – Student 4, 11th-grader In this data the students said that they were disappointed and unhappy because they made a lot of mistakes, and were worried about their own abilities. In addition, this type of emotion cannot be determined through the type of feedback given such as unfocused or focused because almost every student feels the same way when they see the error correction that has been given by the teacher. c. Dissatisfaction “iya kak sama-sama kalo misalnya dari Nur sendiri ini yang kurang dimengerti kayak yang plural or singular sama yang unclear message itu yang kurang dimengerti kayak yang kayaknya kalo misalnya plural sama singular itu kayaknya dulu udah pernah di apa yah, dikerjain? Diajarin cuman lupa jadi ini apa udah gak gak kepake lagi tapi kalo yang uncleaar message itu kurang paham, jadi udah disitu aja kak”. – Student 2, 11th-grader The data obtained from the interviews showed that students found it difficult to understand the feedback that the teacher gave because it was difficult to remember learning materials that had been studied for a long time. The reason for this happening will be explained below. This study shows that students felt various emotional feelings after receiving teacher’s feedback in their narrative text assignments.Some of them were surprised and dissapointed about the writing mistakes they made after they saw the many red marks given by the teacher on their writing, but after they saw the feedback given by the teacher and read it carefully, they were happy because they could find where their mistakes and feedback Feedback was also very useful and motivates them to improve their writing skills. The results of these diverse emotional responses have previously also been found in research conducted by Mahfoodh (2017), the results of research conducted by Mahfoodh show that rejection of feedback is 9.1%, surprised is 4%, feels happiness is 3.4%, dissatisfaction of 2.9. %, disappointment 2.2%, frustration 1.7% and satisfaction 1.5%. This study indicates that the DWCF given by the teacher to the students is very useful and plays an important role in improving their writing skills. The interviews proves that the students did not really expect to get the teacher’s feedback though they were surprised and very happy. the students thought that the teacher usually only gave them gifts without giving or giving feedback. The benefits of DWCF have also been discussed in previous research conducted by Banaruee, et al. (2018) that DWCF has a significant impact on learning to write and it is effective in helping students find where they went wrong and correct it. ELTIN Journal: Journal of English Language Teaching in Indonesia, Volume 10/No 1, April 2022 29 However, one of the students said that they felt difficulties in understanding the feedback given by the teacher in terms of the singular or plural and unclear messages. This happens because the students have not fully mastered the lessons that have been studied previously. This is in line with a study conducted by Shintani and Ellis (2013), which reported that DWCF was not effective enough to help low-ability students correct the writing errors they made. D. CONCLUSION This study aims to find out how the students' emotional response after their assignment was given direct written corrective feedback by the teacher. This research was conducted at one of the senior high schools in Indonesia by involving five students in 11th grade. The first finding discuss students' expectations of the feedback that the teacher would give. The students were surprised and worried that they made a lot of writing errors and got low scores. The second finding discusses the students' responses the teacher’s feedback. In the third finding, the authors found that the students felt enthusiastic and motivated to improve their writing skills thanks to the feedback given by the teacher. They feel that the feedback given by the teacher can help them avoid repeating the same writing mistakes. From all the data that has been found, it can be seen that positive emotional responses dominate all students' emotional responses to DWCF. The data showing that students feel happy is 33% and has been said six times. The emotional responses that are least widely felt by students are surprised and dissatisfaction, which is only 6%. To conclude, the authors found the benefits of DWCF that the teacher’s feedback is very useful. With this in mind, the students want the teacher to continue to provide feedback on each of their assignments. Although giving feedback is quite a time-consuming if it is done for each student, this method is considered to be useful for improving their writing skills. If the teacher wants to improve students' writing skills, this research is expected to help teachers in choosing the types of students' writing errors that students should know and correct. In this study, there are still many limitations in terms of time, number of participants, and the media used. For future research, the authors hope that many other researchers are interested in researching this topic with a variety of different research methods, various learning media and a large number of participants so that the debate about the effectiveness of DWCF can be answered. REFERENCES Banaruee, H., & Askari, A. (2016). Typology of corrective feedback and error analysis. Isfahan: Sana Gostar Publications. ISBN: 978-600-8061-88-5. Banaruee, H., Khatin-Zadeh, O., & Ruegg, R. (2018). Recasts vs. direct corrective feedback on writing performance of high school EFL learners. Cogent Education, 5(1), 1455333 Bitchener, J., & Storch, N. (2016). Written corrective feedback for L2 development. Multilingual Matters. Braun, V., & Clarke, V. (2006). Using thematic analysis in psychology. Qualitative research in psychology, 3(2), 77-101. Chapelle, C. A., & Sauro, S. (2017). Introduction to the handbook of technology and second language teaching and learning. The handbook of technology and second language teaching and learning, 1-9. Daneshvar, E., & Rahimi, A. (2014). Written corrective feedback and teaching grammar. Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences, 136, 217–221. Sari, Suryaman & Yanto: Students’ Emotional Responses Toward … 30 Ellis, R. (2009). Corrective feedback and teacher development. L2 Journal, 1(1). Farrokhi, et al. (2011). The Effects of Focused and Unfocused Written Corrective Feedback on Grammatical Accuracy of Iranian EFL Learners. Theory and Practice in Language Studies, 1(12), 1797-1803 Ferris, D. R. (2010). Second language writing research and written corrective feedback in SLA: Intersections and practical applications. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 32(2), 181-201. Gilgun, J. F. (1994). A case for case studies in social work research. Social work, 39(4), 371- 380. Goleman, D., Boyatzis, R., & McKee, A. (2002). The emotional reality of teams. Journal of Organizational Excellence, 21(2), 55-65. Li, F., & Curdt-Chriatiansen, X. L. (2020). Teacher feedback in UK higher education: Affective and cognitive perceptions of Chinese postgraduate students. International Journal of Educational Research, 104, 1-12, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijer.2020.101674 Mahfoodh, OHA. (2017). “I feel disappointed”: EFL university students’ emotional responses towards teacher written feedback. Assessing Writing, 31, 53–72. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.asw.2016.07.001 Ping, A. L., Pin, V. T. P., Wee, S., & Nah, H. H. (2003). Teacher feedback: A Singaporean perspective. ITL-International Journal of Applied Linguistics, 139(1), 47-75. Rummel, S., & Bitchener, J. (2015). The effectiveness of written corrective feedback and the impact LAO learners’ beliefs have on uptake. Australian Review of Applied Linguistics, 38 (1), 66-84. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1075/aral.38.1.04rum Semke, H. D. (1984). Effects of the red pen. Foreign language annals, 17(3), 195-202. Shintani, N., & Ellis, R. (2013). The comparative effect of direct written corrective feedback and metalinguistic explanation on learners’ explicit and implicit knowledge of the English indefinite article. Journal of Second Language Writing, 22(3), 286–306. Shuman, V., & Scherer, K. R. (2014). Concepts and structures of emotions. International handbook of emotions in education, 23-45. Truscott, J. (2007). The effect of error correction on learners’ ability to write accurately. Journal of second language Writing, 16(4), 255-272. Truscott, J. (2016). The effectiveness of error correction: Why do meta-analytic reviews produce such different answers. Epoch making in English teaching and learning: A special monograph for celebration of ETA-ROC’s 25th anniversary, 129-141. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijer.2020.101674 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.asw.2016.07.001 https://doi.org/10.1075/aral.38.1.04rum