Effects Of Teacher Feedback On The Writing Of Chinese College Non-English Majors

Giving feedback is a crucial procedure in the process-oriented writing approach. The effects of different types of teacher feedback on students'writing have been examined by a substantial quantity of researchers. However, the researches concerning the effects of teacher feedback are scarce in China's EFL context.This study mainly concentrates on effects of three types of teacher feedback, which differ in the focus of the feedback: a) the focus on form b) the focus on content and c) the focus on both form and content. Qualitative and quantitative measures are employed in order to: a) examine students'attitude and preference toward different types of teacher feedback; b) probe the effects that these types of feedback bring on students writing performance; c) determine which type(s) of feedback is (are) more effective in improving students'writing.A longitudinal study over a semester is designed. The subjects involve 27 non-English majors (juniors) from Huazhong University of Science and Technology. They attend a semester-long English writing course instructed by the same teacher and researcher. According to a questionnaire survey conducted at the beginning of the semester, these 27 subjects are assigned to three experimental groups, each group receive a different type of feedback mentioned above.During the semester, every student finishes one piece of argumentation every two weeks and rewrites it based on the teacher feedback in the following week. At the end of the semester, every student has finished 15 pieces of compositions including rewritings. Data are collected from the formal scores and the content scores of the second composition and the seventh composition. Nonparametric tests are performed in order to compare the scores. By the end of the research, a semi-structured interview is conducted to examine the consistency of the results of questionnaire and to probe the explanations for the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of different types of feedback.The quantitative and qualitative results show that students expect to receive teacher feedback in the hope of making improvement on their writing. As for different types of teacher feedback, students with higher English proficiency level prefer the content-related feedback, while those whose English capacity is weaker tend to choose the form-related feedback, however, the most popular type of feedback in the class is still the form and content combined feedback. Regarding the effects of different feedbacks, form focused feedback is effective in improving student writing's formal accuracy and content focused feedback fails to achieve significant improvement on the content quality of students'writing. And lastly, the form-content combined feedback appears to be the more effective type, since both formal and content quality gains could be found in the group receiving this type of feedback.In light of these findings, it is worthwhile to apply teacher feedback to the revising process; and it is also advisable that teachers vary their choices on the types of feedback according to students'ability and preferences, and provide training on the interpretation of feedback to the students.