Functions and Focus of Supervisory Feedback on Undergraduate Students’ Theses Writing

Abstract

In higher English education, undergraduate students improve in their academic writing through the feedback of their supervisors. Supervisor feedback can enhance students’ English writing, However, the functions and focus of feedback remain underexplored. This study examines the functions and focus of supervisory feedback on undergraduate students’ thesis writing across three drafts. The study adopts a descriptive research design to analyze supervisor feedback (369 comments) on undergraduate writing drafts among students enrolled in a Global Communication program at a Malaysian university. Fifteen thesis drafts submitted by five students (three drafts per student) were analyzed to identify the functions and focus of supervisory feedback during the academic writing process. The findings reveal that in terms of speech functions, the feedback can be categorized into three main types: directive, referential, and expressive. Directive feedback, which constitutes the largest proportion (56.6%), is primarily used to give explicit instructions for revision. Referential feedback, the second most frequent type (29.8%), provides information or corrections to support improvement. Expressive feedback, although less common (13.6%), serves to offer emotional support and encouragement. Feedback focus covers three key aspects of English proposal writing: content-related issues, organization, and editing appropriateness. Supervisors primarily focus on content, followed by editing appropriateness and organization. The study shows that the scaffolding through comments on successive drafts of thesis enabled undergraduate students to learn academic writing conventions in writing a research proposal.