An Investigation Into Teachers' Feedback On College English Writing

The ability to compose among college students is far from satisfactory according to the author's teaching experience and their scores in CET 4. Being one of the fundamental skills in language learning, writing is an indispensable part in English teaching. However, the writing teaching is rather time-consuming but unrewarding due to large class size and tight class time. In order to improve students'ability in writing, various English teachers and researchers have been immersed in a number of related studies, among which the role of feedback in writing stands out. The findings of many studies reflect that teacher feedback plays a positive part in improving the writing proficiency. Feedback could greatly help students with the formal accuracy and logical development of content, improving the quality of written papers ultimately. Starting from the reality of the students, the author intends to conduct a case study to find out an effective way to improve the writing ability of students in the teaching college.This paper consists of four chapters. In the first chapter, the author points out that English writing is a weak section in English teaching. The application of feedback plays an important part in the writing teaching. In the second chapter, the author extends to discuss the following elements:the origin and definition of feedback, classification and purpose of feedback, which help command the nature of feedback giving. Then, literature review is extended to answer the following four questions: Should feedback, especially corrective feedback be given? Which feedback should be given? How should feedback be given? Who should do the correcting? In the third chapter, based on the literature review, the author understands more about the current situation of feedback giving and intends to carry out a questionnaire investigation in the college where the author works to gain insight into the feedback on teacher feedback. The questionnaire focuses on students'preference towards teacher feedback and teachers'actual practice. It mainly contains multiple choices, some of which need only one answer and some could have one more answer. It involves 200 students in total. All the data are typed into the computer and analyzed by SPSS 13.0. The results provide several pieces of information:1) Teachers still favor traditional marking (grades and marks are given on written paper) and collective feedback (the mistakes are collected and made public in class, without identifying specific information on students). However, students would rather get feedback from teacher-student conferencing and via private e-mails, which could be more individual and focused.2) Teachers are more form-oriented when providing feedback while students are in favor of feedback on both form and content.3) Generally, there is no distinctive difference centering on the expectations in respect of the factor of gender.4) There is distinctive difference between students'preferences towards feedback and teachers'actual practice.5) Students of art slightly value more feedback on form while students of science stress more feedback on content.Based on the results of the study, the author believes it is time for teachers to make changes and revision to perfect the feedback giving. The author emphasizes that teachers should adopt a variety of feedback styles and try to exercise multi-draft writing in class.