An Empirical Study On Feedback Approaches To The Teaching Of College English Writing

Within the field of second and foreign language teaching, the teaching of writing has come to assume a much more central position than it occupied twenty or thirty years ago. As a result, more and more teachers and researchers have been paying attention to second language writing all around the world. Among these researches, providing feedback is often considered as one of the most important tasks, but not enough emphasis has been put on giving feedbacks to the non-English major college students in China.The present study attempts to explore the possible effects of various forms of feedback on improving students'writing proficiency in EFL teaching and finds out an effective approach of feedback to enhance Chinese EFL learners'writing.In this study, the author put emphasis on the empirical study of teacher feedback and multiple feedbacks on students'compositions. Two groups of students were compared:(1) the experimental group which received 17-week multiple feedbacks which included peer feedback, feedback conference, positive feedback on content and form of students' writing, receiving scores and comments on their final drafts from the teacher and making revisions according to these feedbacks, and (2) the control group which received teacher feedback including scoring, direct error feedback and comments on content and organization, and then made revision referring to teacher feedback.The author finds out from the results that multiple feedbacks in this study outperform teacher feedback in writing proficiency of students referring to holistic scoring. And the questionnaire data shows that the majority of students in the experimental group consider using multiple feedbacks as a new and effective approach to improve their English writing.This study designed to examine the effects of different approaches of feedback on the. improvement of the proficiency of students'writing can be of a great help to the teaching of English writing and can also provide pedagogical implications for the English language teaching and writing in the China-specific context.