The Effect Of Teacher Written Feedback On ESL Students' Revision Of Writing And Their Revision Process

Writing in English is an important language productive ability. In the early 1980s, the teaching of writing, as a discipline, gradually drew attention, and the teacher written feedback, as one essential part of the teaching of writing, was becoming focused as well.In China, correcting students'writing is always considered as the teachers'main task and teacher written feedback dominates in the teaching of English writing. However, the problem is always there that teacher spends abundant time and energy in providing feedback just failing to get satisfactory effect: the students utilize few teacher written feedbacks, even totally ignore them.So, it is of great significance to examine what kind of characteristics of the teacher written feedback is involved in successful revision, what strategies the student adopts when utilizing the feedback and what factors like the background of the individual students, the context of situation to be associated with successful revision after teacher written feedback.The 40 subjects in this study is from Level 2 (L2) classes of Huazhong University of Science and Technology (HUST), the instrument includes the teacher's comments, the students' drafts before and after the comments, and their Chinese report on how they treat or read the teacher written feedback which shed light on their revision processesIn this study, Associations between characteristics of the comments and the success of students' subsequent revisions are first examined. Then, the author sums up some common strategies adopted by the students when revising their compositions. In addition, three individual students were selected to examine in detail the factors that play a role in revision process through their Chinese revision reports.The study results indicate that some characteristics of teacher written feedback were associated with successful revision such as the use of declaratives rather than questions, further analysis reveals that only one feature typically related to revision success: the type of revision problem that was addressed. Students tended to be successful in resolving many types of revision problems (e.g., adding examples, enhancing cohesion), but they were unsuccessful in revising problems related to explanation, explicitness, and analysis. Typical factors in this study such as content knowledge, strongly-held beliefs, the course context, and pressure of other commitments provide explanations for students' revision decisions and account for unexpected success or lack of success in their revising. All in all, in order to understand how students revise in response to written feedback, we must look not only at the nature of the comments themselves, but also at the types of problems students are being asked to revise, revision strategies student adopted and at individual factors affecting the students.At last, hopefully, the conclusions reached and strategies derived from this exploratory study can provide some new insights into the instruction and research into teacher written feedback of Chinese college English writing. At the same time, it encourages the further in-depth research by employing various means such as interview, recordings to get aware of students'revising process, thus to meet the need of college English writing and improve the students'writing ability.