Investigating the Effects of Synchronous and Asynchronous Teacher Electronic Feedback on EFL Learners’ Syntactic Complexity in Online Writing

The present study aims to investigate the impacts of teacher electronic feedback (TEF) on syntactic complexity of online writing produced by advanced English as Foreign Language (EFL) learners. A total of 180 argumentative essays were written by 33 advanced EFL learners in a language institute in Zanjan, Iran. The learners were randomly assigned to two experimental groups and a control group, with twelve learners receiving synchronous TEF, and twelve learners receiving asynchronous TEF. Eight measures of complexity were used to calculate the learners’ syntactic complexity. For data analysis, a series of one-way ANOVAs and two-way ANOVAs were performed to respectively ensure the participants’ homogeneity prior to treatment and analyze the development of syntactic complexity over time. The results indicated that synchronous TEF provided through video conferencing and text chats significantly improved the production of compound-complex sentences and longer noun phrases, while asynchronous TEF using Microsoft Word track changes had only a significant effect on the length of noun phrases. The findings indicate that synchronous and asynchronous TEF can be effective in increasing learners' syntactic complexity, and that combining both strategies may be the most effective approach for teachers to provide feedback in online writing classes.