Revisiting Praise as Feedback in L2 Writing: Where are we Going?

While a plethora of studies have been conducted on corrective feedback in L2 writing, praise as feedback has received less attention in L2 writing despite its well-acknowledged motivating functions in education and psychology (For economy of expression, the word “praise” will be used consistently throughout this paper to denote “praise as feedback”). To fill this gap, this review article aims to provide a bird's eye view of praise in L2 writing. This paper reports praise givers’ perceptions and practices, praise receivers’ perceptions and the effect of praise from reviewed studies. Specifically, this paper highlights the issue of ill-defined praise in L2 writing, the mismatch between teachers’ positive perceptions and their practices, inconsistent findings regarding the effectiveness of praise as well as motivating functions of praise. Based on these findings, this article argues that more attention should be given to unleashing the potential of praise through teachers’ giving balanced and quality praise and more investigations of praise with longitudinal research design and multiple data sources so as to advance our understandings of feedback in student L2 writing development.