The Effects Of Teacher Written Corrective Feedback On English Writing

This empirical study was an attempt to explore the effects of teacher writtencorrective feedback on non-English majors'writing in China. Specifically, it examinedwhether the direct feedback or the indirect feedback in the way of underlining with adescription of types of errors led the learners to improve their linguistic accuracy butreduce the writing complexity. In addition, this paper tried to measure whether thespecific feedback and the general feedback on content provided by teacher could pushthe learners to enhance their writing content.The experiment lasted 16 weeks. The subjects were 54 sophomores from a collegein Hunan province. These subjects were divided into the direct group, the indirectgroup and the control group according to their pretest scores and the types of feedbackthat they received. Each group was composed of 18 subjects. The direct group (n=18,11males and 7 females) received direct correction about their linguistic errors in thewriting and some detailed feedback about the content; the indirect group (n=18, 13males and 5 females) got indirect feedback in the form of underlining with thedescription of the type of the error and some general feedback about the content; thecontrol group (n=18, 8 males and 10 females) had no feedback. During the experiment,each subject wrote 8 argumentative essays and revised his/her essay at least once.The linguistic accuracy, the language complexity, and the quality of the content ofall the valid writings were evaluated rigorously and objectively, and were analyzedqualitatively and quantitatively by using the SPSS (Statistical Package for the SocialSciences, version 13.0). Through One-way ANOVA, Paired-samples T Test,Independent-samples T Test and ANCOVA, this paper obtained the following results:1) At the first time of writing, the three groups of students made many linguisticerrors, and there were no notable differences among them. After 7 times of feedback,the direct group and the indirect group increased linguistic accuracy significantly.Moreover, the direct group did much better than the indirect group. The control groupdid not get significant change. Through specifying the errors, this study found: at thelast time of writing, both the direct group and the indirect group made significantlyfewer verb and article errors in comparison to the control group; the direct group hadnoticeably fewer verb errors, article errors, wrong word errors and sentence structureerrors than the indirect group did; the indirect group was just noticeably better than thedirect group in the use the noun endings. In addition, the number of linguistic errors in the 8 essays fluctuated and did not develop linearly.2) The form-focused teacher written corrective feedback did not have negativeeffects on linguistic complexity. Compared with their first writing, the vocabularydiversity was improved dramatically while the syntactic complexity had no significantchanges in the eighth writing for the three groups of students. Furthermore, thelinguistic complexity of the eighth essay did not differ significantly among the threegroups.3) At the beginning of the experiment, the writing content of the three groups wasnot satisfactory and the quality of the content did not show significant differencesamong the three groups. 16 weeks later, the direct group who had received the detailedteacher written corrective feedback to the content and the indirect group who got thegeneral feedback significantly improved the content of their writings and the twogroups did not have notable differences. However, the control group who did not getany feedback did not greatly enhance their writing content.Based on the above findings, this thesis provided some constructive suggestionsfor the foreign language writing. Teacher written corrective feedback was an importantway which caused learners to notice the gap between their interlanguage and the targetlanguage. Moreover, most learners had expectation for teachers'feedback and thefeedback was the motivation for them to promote their writing. Therefore, the teacherneeded to provide systematic feedback to the learners. In providing feedback, teachersshould consider various factors, explore the feedback types which mapped the learners'language proficiency and focus on both language and content so as to raise thelearners'writing level comprehensively. Meanwhile, after giving feedback, teachershad better supply learners with opportunities for revisions, thus drawing their attentionto the feedback and push them to internalize and consolidate the knowledge of theforeign language.