The Direction of a Writing Centre: a Research into the Effects of Directive and Non-Directive Peer-Feedback on Students’ Text Structure quality
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2017-07-28
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en
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With a drastic increase in number of writing centres in the Netherlands over the last ten years, their actual effectiveness becomes more and more important. Whereas students’ attitudes about the writing centres’ non-directive approach have been proved to be very positive (e.g. Archer, 2008; Tan, 2009), the effects on students’ writing skills remain unclear. Trying to fill this gap, this paper reports the findings of an experiment that exposes to what extent students’ text structure get influenced by writing centre interventions. 41 students that visited a writing centre in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, were randomly assigned to the experimental condition (i.e., non-directive peer-feedback) or a control condition (directive peer-feedback). The results indicated that students’ texts structure quality increased similarly after both types of feedback: whereas the text structure on paragraph and textual level improved, the external structure did not. Moreover, the text structure quality of a given, weak, text that had to be improved by the participants was similarly influenced by the two types of intervention. These results suggest that non-directive interventions do increase students’ text structuring skills, but do not increase their skills more or differently than directive peer-feedback does.
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