A Study Of College English Writing Feedback From The Perspective Of Embodied Philosophy

The English writing ability of non-English majors has been the weakest of the four basic skills(listening, reading, speaking and writing). As the statistics of score in CET-4 reveals, Chinese college students are poor at writing. Although English writing plays a significant role in improving students'integrate ability of English, the teaching of English writing needs to be improved. Therefore, researchers and teachers are going all out to help students to improve their writing ability.As an important procedure of process approach, feedback attracts much attention from researchers. There are a lot of researches about it, from which some views are contradictory. In China, there aren't a lot of empirical studies on it. As for this, there exist many problems in these studies: few theories about English writing feedback have been put into practice; no attention is drawn on feedback systematically and consistently. Of all, most studies ignore the individual differences of students who are the cognition subjects and their embodied experience in writing and feedback, while theoretically they hold that students have already incorporated the feedbacks.The current study aims at studying how the subjectivity of each student and their embodied experience in writing and feedback function in college English writing. Specifically, the research attempts to answer the following questions :1) How does the feedback in the thesis which focuses on students'subjectivi- ty and their embodied experience function ?2) What are the different functions to teacher feedback and to peer feedback from the perspective of Embodied Philosophy (Lakoff & Johnson,1999)? 3) What enlightenment will be provided for college English teaching ?Based on the literary review of the feedback study, this thesis reports an study with a controlled group and two experimental groups on the effects of feedbacks on college English writing from the perspective of Embodied Philosophy, applying questionnaire, semi-open interview. It reveals the effects of feedbacks from such perspective, and reports the relationship between the existing individuals and the validity of feedbacks during the interaction of teachers and students, from the view of subjectivity of cognition.The thesis consists of four chapters in addition to an introduction and a conclusion.The introduction briefly introduces the current situation about English writing of Chinese non-English majors, the origin and development of the definition of"feedback", and reviews the studies on feedbacks of English writing home and abroad. It also points out that it is necessary to carry out further exploration of embodied mind in English writing.Chapter One represents an introduction to different linguistics approaches and their theories, a survey and reflection of feedback study home and abroad on second language writing, aiming at pointing out the reflection and inadequacy of these studies.The second chapter views a survey of the origin, development, and major features of the concept of experience. Embodied Philosophy is described in detail together with its enlightenment on the current study. Embodied Philosophy focuses on the interaction between the individuals and the circumstance, in which mental activities rely on our bodies and brains, and mental understanding on specific experiences.Chapter Three is the main body of the whole thesis in which the data is collected from the view of empirical study then will be compared in the ways of the quantitative and qualitative analysis. The participants chosen for the study are divided into three groups (two experimental groups and one control group), with each group ten students. The three groups are provided with three writing tasks which are chosen from their current text books (New College English Integrated Course (4). Shanghai Foreign Language Education Press, 2003). With each task accomplished, each group will get feedbacks from their teacher or peers. Then students will rewrite according to the first feedback, and again gain one more feedback on the same task. In the end, the statistics analysis will be done about each writing task and about the whole data of the three tasks. The data analysis comes at last.The fourth part serves as the findings and enlightenments from this study, and offers a new perspective in the pedagogy English writing. The research focuses on how to improve self-study ability and reduce teachers'heavy bur- den of correction and making comments.The conclusion stresses the pedagogical implication from this study, together with limitations of the current study and constructive suggestions for future research on English writing feedbacks.