Chinese EFL Students’ Response To Teacher Feedback In Their Revising Process:an Empirical Study

As an important part of process writing, different types of feedback mode have been widely used in EFL writing teaching in recent years, and a great many researches have been conducted on feedback. The present study investigates how students of peer-editing group make use of teacher feedback in their revising process, and whether there are any differences compared with the self-editing group. Furthermore, the research also examines the characteristics in revising their essays among students of different scores, and explores the revising process of EFL students.One class of Chinese university EFL students participated in the present study. This class consisted of twenty nine sophomores who majored in English in School of Foreign Languages and Literature, Shandong University. The participants were divided into an experimental group (n=20) and a control group (n=9) to revise their essays after receiving teacher feedback. The experimental group peer-edited their essays on content, structure and language errors, while the control group self-edited their essays. The author triangulated data resources with students’original and revised essays, the think-aloud protocols and stimulated recalls. The experimental group was sub-divided into10peer-editing groups, each of which was composed of two subjects. After receiving the teacher feedback, each peer editing group was required to discuss each other’s essays and negotiate possible alternatives when they spot language errors, content and structure problems, then write down the revised essay on a new piece of paper. Four peer-editing groups were chosen randomly to be audiotape-recorded during their discussion. In the control group, based on the teacher feedback they received, the participants were required to revise their original writing while providing concurrent verbal reports or think-aloud protocols.The findings are yielded as follows:(1) the students who engaged in peer-editing incorporated more teacher feedback in their revised drafts and made more successful revisions than those who self-edited their essays after receiving teacher feedback.(2) EFL students were more successful in editing errors in the "treatable" category (verbs, noun endings, and articles) than the "untreatable" types (word choice and sentence structure). Moreover, the peer-editing group was more successful in revising language errors than the self-editing group.(3) According to the analysis of students of different scores, there is a significant relationship between students’writing proficiency and the efficiency of teacher feedback and revision quality. Students of different scores showed different behavior tendencies in their revising process.The incorporation of peer feedback, when students use teacher feedback to revise their essays, does help students to have a better understanding and a higher use of teacher feedback. Meanwhile, it is also beneficial to develop students’language abilities. Thus, it is advisable to incorporate teacher and peer feedback in the Chinese EFL writing class. Future research should look into what ways the two types of feedback can achieve the maximum effectiveness.