A meta-analysis on the impact of teacher feedback on students' writing performance

The necessity of teacher written feedback on student writing in EFL have always been a heated and challenging topic of improving student writing proficiency. Even though it is expected that teacher feedback has positive contributions, in literature there is a debate questioning the efficacy of teacher feedback on students' writing. The aim of this study is to investigate the studies on the topic of teacher written feedback and its impact on learners' writing performance by using meta-analysis, a method of collecting related studies by doing an extensive literature search. With this aim, 24 related articles and master's theses over the past 15 years were examined attentively. This study compiles these aforementioned publications with the findings of each and in this way enables the readers to be able to see the related studies all together shedding the light on the effect of teacher feedback. The findings revealed that 21 out of 24 studies found teacher feedback positive, while 3 remained neutral. None of the studies result in negative outcome. These results show that teacher feedback had a positive effect of 87.5% on students' writing. Moreover, 61.9% of these positive results were found to be quite effective. These findings raise awareness on the importance of teacher written feedback.