Modalities of Written Corrective Feedback: An Exploratory Study of Teaching Practices in the Translation Classroom

Abstract

Research on assessment in translator training has focused on error analysis and the development of rating scales. However, there is little empirical work on formative assessment and feedback in the translation classroom. The aim of this research is to explore how written corrective feedback received by learners in assessment tasks takes shape in a given academic context. The analysis of a corpus of more than a thousand activities corrected by teachers at a Catalan university has allowed us to identify five different modalities. In general, teachers’ feedback is unidirectional, overemphasises the role of error and focuses on the task, which raises the question of the extent to which its function is formative.