The Effects Of Teachers’Written Corrective Feedback On English Writing By Chinese University Students

Corrective feedback has become a hot topic in the field of SLA home and abroad. Even so, empirical investigations which seek to investigate the effects of teacher written corrective feedback on the writing of Chinese EFL learners at high and low proficiency levels are few. Taking Interaction Hypothesis, Comprehensible Output Hypothesis and Noticing Hypothesis as main theoretic foundations and basing on the related researches on the corrective feedback by Ellis, Ashwell, Lee, Chandler, Bitchener, Fathman&Whalley, the current study tries to answer the effects of teacher written corrective feedback on writing of Chinese EFL learners at high and low proficiency levels.The current study tries to answer two issues;The first issue:How do the TWCF affect the writing content and language accuracy of high-and low-level students? To what extent?The second issue:Are there any differences between high-and low-level students in terms of writing content and language accuracy? If so, how do they differ?The current empirical study lasts approximately12weeks. The subjects are20non-English major students in a university in Hunan, ten of whom are high-level students and another ten are low-level students. The requirement for teacher written corrective feedback is to provide the correct language forms and specific content feedback about the students’ writing.Questionnaire, interview, composition task writing and SPSS (17.0version) were adopted in the present study to make quantitative analysis and qualitative analysis. The major findings of the study were revealed as follows:(I) Teacher written corrective feedback notably improved students’ writing content and writing accuracy of high-level students of Chinese EFL learners. Specifically speaking, writing accuracy covers five aspects, sentence structure, verb, article, noun ending and word. The study indicated that five aspects of high-level students have been notably improved.(II) Teacher written corrective feedback significantly improved the writing accuracy of low-level students of Chinese EFL learners. But it did not notably improve the writing content. As for writing accuracy, the usage of verb, article, noun ending were significantly improved by TWCF rather than sentence structure and word.Teacher feedback is an important method to raise students’attention on the differences between interlanguage and target language. The results of questionnaire indicated that most learners think teacher feedback is useful, which is a great motivation to improve their writing. The current study result also tries to offer the guidelines for EFL teaching in China. Teachers should provide corrective feedback on language errors and content expressions when students made mistakes in their writings to make them notice the feedback to internalize and consolidate their foreign language knowledge.