Sophia Vanttinen-Newton
As EAP practitioners, we constantly seek how better to engage students with feedback comments and create sustainable feedback practices (Boud and Soler, 2016). This paper is prompted by a desire to highlight the powerful role of emoticon and emoji usage in creating teacher/student dialogic feedback loops/practices and to show how emoticons and emojis can be used in written feedback comments. To achieve this, it employs a mixed methods case study which collated questionnaires and qualitative semi-structured guided conversations involving 18 international students at different levels of EAP study across a range of UK university programmes: foundation, undergraduate and postgraduate. This research builds upon recent studies by Grieve et al. (2019) and Moffitt et al. (2020), which suggest that tutors can use positively valenced emotions to inject fun, warmth and emotionality into online feedback via Turnitin, without sacrificing feedback quality or professional integrity. The paper concludes that emoticons and emojis can have a positive and beneficial impact on student feedback engagement in reducing teacher–student transactional distance, helping to understand the meaning of feedback comments and controlling their intensity.
