Grading, no longer an obstacle to learners’ attendance to teacher feedback

Learners are often reported not to be motivated enough to attend to teacher feedback. Teachers also  tend  to  grade  learners’  writing  samples  when  providing  them  with  corrective  feedback though  they  know  it  may  divert  their  attention  away  from  teacher  feedback.  However,  not grading learner writings does not seem to be an option due to both learners’ demands for it and institutional  regulations  that  require  teachers  to  have  summative  evaluation.  In  order  to overcome  such  contradictions,  a  new  technique  called  Draft-Specific  Scoring  (DSS)  was devised  in  order  to  use  grading  as  a  motivating,  rather  than  demotivating,  device  in  order  to encourage learners to attend to teacher feedback and apply it to their first drafts to improve the quality  of  their  writing  accordingly.  DSS  is  a  grading  system  in  which  learners  can  improve their received grade by applying teacher feedback to their writing samples in order to improve its quality. The score they receive will improve as a result of the improvement in the quality of the revisions they make. They have two opportunities to go through this procedure. Their final score  will  be  the  mean  score  of  all  the  grades  they  receive  in  their  last  drafts  submitted.  This experimental  study  was  an  attempt  to  check  the  effect  of  the  use  of  this  technique  in  error feedback  provision  on  three  measures  of  fluency,  grammatical  complexity,  and  accuracy.  The results  showed  that  DSS  could  help  learners  improve  in  all  three  measures  while  the  control group receiving only error feedback without DSS could only improve in fluency.