Low-Proficiency Students’ Cognitive and Affective Engagement with Combined Audio and Indirect Written Feedback in an EFL Writing Class

The importance of learners’ cognitive and affective engagement with teachers’ feedback has been recognized, but they remained underexplored. To bridge this gap, this qualitative research aims to understand the dynamics of low-proficiency English learners’ cognitive and affective engagement with a teacher’s combined modes of feedback (CMF) in an Indonesian EFL context. A class of first-semester learners, working individually and in pairs, wrote narrative and descriptive texts and revised their texts. Data was collected with an open-ended questionnaire and a retrospective interview. The results showed that students engaged with the teacher’s CMF both cognitively and affectively but to varying degrees. Most of them were aware of the feedback by noticing and understanding the writing issues addressed by the feedback, and they used cognitive and meta-cognitive strategies that led them to have positive and negative emotional reactions and attitudinal responses. The last section discusses the pedagogical implications, limitations, and future directions for research.