Öğretmen düzeltici geribildirimi ile yükseköğretim seviyesi yazımında mantıksal hataların azaltılması

Writing skill is an important component of English language teaching. In addition to providing learning opportunities to improve students' general writing abilities, teaching the conventions of academic writing is also significant to better prepare the learners for their academic lives. In teaching academic writing, argumentative writing stands out to be crucial since it allows students to discuss an issue from a variety of aspects and convince readers by proposing evidence to support their claims and arguments. Yet, students may resort to logical fallacies knowingly or unknowingly while proposing their arguments. Though the role of logical fallacies is critical and crucial in proposing sound and valid arguments, there is almost no or very rare focus on them in most of the writing contexts. Moreover, critical thinking, which is a significant 21st century skill for learners, is closely related to being able to detect fallacious claims in both one's own arguments and in the sources that they read, see, and listen to. Having awareness and knowledge of logical fallacies could help students have a more critical approach and filter the information they are exposed to. Therefore, there is a need to focus explicitly on logical fallacies to raise students' awareness and guide them to formulate their arguments in a fallacy-free manner. Thereby, this study aims to focus on the logical fallacies found in university students' argumentative essays and how to reduce them through teacher corrective feedback. Despite the variety of studies on diverse aspects of writing such as the development of content, organization, language use, etc., there is a scarcity of studies specifically targeting logical fallacies which are commonly found in especially argumentative texts. There are several studies that describe the frequency of different types of logical fallacies in student essays. Yet, they do not attempt to decrease the fallacious claims through corrective feedback despite acknowledging the necessity of explicit instruction on logical fallacies to raise awareness. This study is significant since it sheds light on how feedback given by the teacher and explicit instruction influence the presence of logical fallacies in argumentative essays. To this end, 43 students taking a must English course, the focus of which is learning English for academic purposes, at a state university in Turkey participated in the study. A pre-experimental design was adopted and there was only the experimental group whose pre-test and post-test results as well as the differences between the first drafts and seconds drafts of their argumentative essays were utilized to detect whether teacher correct feedback had a role in reducing logical fallacies in their arguments. In order to collect data, a mixed method approach was followed. Qualitative data was collected through student writings and individual interviews. In this study, qualitative data about logical fallacies was collected from four writing tasks. A process writing approach was followed for the first three writings; the very first writing was the pre-test and the last writing task was utilized as the post-test. A fallacy approach and content analysis were used to identify the existing logical fallacies in the essays. The results obtained from each writing task and each draft were tabulated on MS Microsoft Excel and analyzed to quantify the qualitative data by using SPSS-22. The results indicated that some types of logical fallacies were more common compared to the others and continued to be more frequent in the students' essays although a decrease in their number was observed after giving teacher corrective feedback. Moreover, it was revealed by the results that teacher corrective feedback had a significant role in reducing the logical fallacies in the students' argumentative essays. Further qualitative data was obtained by conducting individual semi-structured interviews with 13 volunteering students after the treatment was over to probe their attitudes in order to gain a deeper insight into their experiences. The interviews were fully transcribed and analyzed to determine the relevant codes, categories, and themes using content analysis. The results of the interviews illustrated that the learners found it to be quite useful to explicitly focus on the logical fallacies in their essays and referred to certain benefits of the treatment including gaining awareness about logical fallacies, having a more critical approach towards their arguments, and improving the quality of their writings. The learners also mostly shared positive views about the learning and teaching materials utilized in the study, process writing approach, and coded feedback. Consequently, this study contributes to the literature by showing the role of an explicit focus on logical fallacies through teacher corrective feedback. Furthermore, the implications as well as suggestions for English language teaching and especially writing classes are shared.