The role of feedback in the writing competence of Foreign Language English students in Andalusia

While a growing body of research has been carried out in the last decade to investigate how to develop students' feedback literacy in higher education, studies in English Language Teaching in secondary education are scanty. The main objective of this study, undertaken in the 3rd year of compulsory secondary education, is to investigate how pupils and the supervising teacher perceived feedback prior to a cycle of action-research interventions. Moreover, it aims at looking into the effects of the intervention on students' feedback literacy and writing competence in English. To this end, the study was conducted combining both quantitative and qualitative research instruments: two Likert-scale questionnaires, a semi-structure interview and a writing portfolio. Feedback literacy, understood as the dispositions, understandings, and commitment to applying feedback, was trained to boost students' writing through feedback workshops. Learners engaged in activities to discuss, decode, and act upon the feedback they received after submitting three writing tasks. The results suggest that students gained strategies to spot and correct their own mistakes, developed writing fluency, and came to appreciate the usefulness of feedback in taking an active role in their own learning.