The purpose of the study is to compare the nature of teacher talk between the native and non-native speaking professors with its focus on language functions and interaction modifications in English-mediated writing instruction. The study analyzed the classroom languages of two professors who were teaching college-level composition courses using the same textbook and syllabus. The classes taught by the two professors were videotaped, transcribed, and analyzed based on the AS-unit. The results showed both professors used all of the five functions in the order of information, suasion, opinion, future plans, and checking. The NS professor, on the other hand, used the information function more often, while the NNS professor relied more on the suasion function. The data also displayed that the NS professor gave more feedback responses, whereas the NNS professor asked more clarification requests and repeated their own utterances. The findings implied that the types and distribution of the teacher talk may be influenced by the subject-matter and the instructional foci of each professor.

This study examines what role English writing instructors need to play in peer revision activities. Students participating in the study were asked to go through multiple draft writing process in which they wrote three drafts on each writing assignment and review their peers’ essays in both a written comment sheet and an oral discussion. Overall, the results show that the peer comments played little role in improving the students’ essays from the first to second drafts. However, great improvement is observed from the second to final drafts. Specifically, little effect of the feedback on the improvement of non-linguistic features of the essays is identified. Regarding the linguistic features, improvement was made from the second to final drafts. However, it is achieved by both the peer and teacher comments. Therefore, it is concluded in the study that the teacher comments played a role in helping the students produce the linguistically improved final drafts. The study recommends the instructor’s explicit, detailed feedback to the errors caused from students’ insufficient writing and English competence.

Recognizing the importance of output and noticing in the second language acquisition, the present study investigated whether model writings and noticing-triggering activities can serve as one form of written feedback to learners’ writing. Particularly, it was interested in whether two different noticing-triggering activities would have different effects on learners’ noticing and incorporation in immediate and delayed revisions. To this end, 93 university students in three English composition classes in Busan were asked to take part in four-staged picture-cued narrative writing task (i.e., drafting, comparison, immediate revision, and delayed revision). The three classes engaged in different activities (i.e., note-taking, underlining, or reading) while they were comparing their own writing and the given models. The results indicated that models as written feedback have led learners to notice linguistic forms that they have previously found problematic or have not thought of as problematic. Furthermore, the note-taking activity in the comparison stage seemed to help learners better incorporate the linguistic forms included in the subsequent input.