Investigating the Impact of Written Feedback : Mood and Modal Verbs on L2 Student Revision Outcome

Previous research has shown that feedback given with an imperative mood is more likely to lead to positive student revision outcomes (Sugita, 2006; Gascoigne, 2004; Nurmukhamedov and Kim, 2010), but the mechanism underlying these outcomes has been rarely explored. Based on a survey of students, Sugita (2006), from the perspective of students’ feelings, gave an explanation that imperative feedback can give a clear direction. The present study explained this from another perspective of the feedback form: IMP feedback was correlated with more closed feedback so that a high clarity with a strong mood can be achieved.

In this study, we compared the effectiveness of Indicative (IND), Interrogative (INT), and Imperative (IMP) mood feedback on students’ revision outcomes. Then, we evaluated different aspects of the relationship between the variables by using a Chi-square, T-test, and One-way ANOVA test. Major findings were: (1) IMP was the most effective mood, followed by IND, whereas INT was the least effective; (2) there were significant differences between each of the mood feedback groups; (3) we examined the other variable: modal verbs, which found that stronger modal verbs resulted in better revision outcomes. Such tendency was similar to the mood aspect; (4) mood had a strong effect size on students’ revision outcomes while modal verbs had a medium effect size; (5) IMP feedback significantly correlated with a more closed type of suggestions for the revision, which could explain why IMP feedback was the most “productive” to result in good outcomes. This study can potentially provide implications for teachers’ effective use of moods and modal verbs in their future feedback.