Feedback practices in Humanities university classrooms: Teachers’ written digital comments and students’ writers profiles

Abstract

University studies imply the access to a disciplinary culture where knowledge production and the ways of communication it involve a learning process that needs to be taught in higher education. In connection with this, we present results obtained with regard to the feedback practices between teachers and freshmen students of Humanities, taking into account the ‘written digital comments’ (CEDs) provided by the teachers in the successive rewritings of presentations elaborated by the students in a gradual process. We aim to determine what kinds of CEDs are more frequent in the analyzed corpus and, depending on this, to establish interactions with different ‘writer's profiles’ (novices and experts), according to the criterion of the teacher-tutor. Data was gathered in a first year course from a public Argentinian university, where teachers carry out cycles of critical participative action-research, in which the students learn the ways of knowledge production, while writing a presentation and communicating/discussing it within a scientific event. Regarding the corpus, we have selected and classified the CEDs provided by a tutor in the different drafts of twelve student group presentations, attending to categories and subcategories referred to the ‘mode’ and to the ‘focus’. Partial results indicate that there would be quantitative differences in the CEDs of the tutor, in relation to the writer's different profiles, and certain similarities, in the orientations that the tutor provides about central aspects of academic discourse.