Useful and Appropriate: How Preservice Ela Teachers React to Teacher Feedback on El Student Writing

English Language Arts teachers in the United States are tasked with teaching and providing feedback to an increasingly culturally and linguistically diverse student population. This study examines what preservice secondary English Language Arts teachers (PSETs) consider to be useful and appropriate feedback to English Learner (EL) writers with a view to better preparing teachers to engage in linguistically responsive feedback practices. Findings of this qualitative study show that PSETs valued linguistic diversity, shared many core orientations of linguistically responsive teaching, and desired to give ELs holistic writing feedback; however, they struggled in the application of those values and ultimately equated effective EL feedback with grammatical error correction. Furthermore, even though PSETs were highly attuned to EL errors, they were not able to connect different types of errors to language development, seemingly resorting to exhaustive error correction because they could not determine which errors were appropriate to correct given the proficiency level of the student. To better align feedback practices with expressed values, we suggest supplementing extant PSET attention to grammar with additional knowledge of language development processes. Identifying proficiency-level-appropriate errors could allow PSETs to selectively correct errors and provide space for more substantive feedback on ELA content.