A Study On The Efficacy Of Teacher Written Feedback In Multiple-draft Composition Classroom

English writing, as an important productive skill, is gaining an increasing attention and its importance has been widely accepted in college writing teaching. As process-oriented pedagogy has permeated L2 writing instruction, the students are encouraged or required by their teachers to conduct multiple drafts of a single writing and various ways to provide feedback have been explored so as to help students revise as they move through the stages of the writing process. In other words, one of the chief issues for all of the composition teachers is to provide effective feedback. Recently,the focus of teacher written feedback has shifted from language form to meaning-level issues. Debate on the issue of how to balance form and content teacher response to student writing is still inclusive. And relevant study at home is rarely seen.The paper has run back over the theoretical foundation of feedback and gives a brief literature review of the definition and classification of feedback, especially its application in writing. Moreover, related theories and approaches of writing in L2 have been stated, namely, interaction between the Output Hypothesis and feedback as well as the correlation between feedback and Noticing Hypothesis. Following the same line, the theoretical underpinnings including previous research evidence on teacher written feedback have been analyzed followed with a summary in regard to research orientation of the present study.In order to make research as more appropriate for EFL learner in China as possible, and more close to the status quo of China's college teaching, two research instruments have been employed. A questionnaire is administrated to find out student's attitude towards teacher feedback and reaction to multiple-draft composition. Meanwhile, the empirical study is performed to further investigate how composition teacher respond to student writing in regard to language form and content in multiple-draft composition classroom so as to maximize the effectiveness of teacher written feedback and improve non-English majors'writing performance and capacity. Namely, the treatment groups will receive three different patterns of teacher written feedback from draft1 to draft3 and a control group with no feedback. Moreover, the data is analyzed by means of SPSS 14.0, in which One-way ANOVA and Paired-Samples T Test are employed.It comes to the conclusion that teacher written feedback no matter which pattern does have a great positive effect on learner's writing which lends support to previous researches. Although the study does not point out which pattern of teacher written feedback has absolute advantage in the improvement of learner's writing, it re-emphasized the importance of teacher written feedback and necessity of both content-focused and form-focused teacher response. Comparatively speaking, if it is necessary to choose a relatively superior pattern in helping students process feedback successfully, feedback given at both stages with the form-focused and content-focused as an integration can be taken into consideration.