LITERACY ACQUISITION AND FEEDBACK: AN INVESTIGATION ON THE EFFECTS OF FORM-BASED FEEDBACK AND CONTENT-BASED FEEDBACK ON THE ENGLISH WRITING OF HARD-OF-HEARING STUDENTS IN SINGAPORE

Abstract

This thesis attempts to investigate into the effects of feedback on the English writing of hard-of-hearing students in Singapore, particularly the form-based feedback and content-based feedback. To do this, this study recruited three hardof- hearing students aged between 13 and 17 studying in a mainstream secondary school in Singapore. The participants were subject to two types of feedback intervention (form-based and content-based) twice, over the course of four sessions held over three weeks. They were required to write pre-intervention and post-intervention essays and the differences in text quality were measured after the feedback intervention was applied. This thesis set out to answer two hypotheses: all participants would see improvement in text quality regardless of the type of feedback given; the greatest improvement of text quality would be found under the content-based feedback intervention. The results of this study confirms the hypotheses that feedback is beneficial for the hard-of-hearing students’ writing performance, and that content-based feedback would lead to the greatest improvement, as compared to form-based feedback.