Effects Of Teacher Written Corrective Feedback On The Accuracy Of English Writing Of Junior High School Students

For most Chinese students, writing proficiency is considered difficult to acquire in the process of learning English. With the emergence of process teaching method in the 1970s and the problems existing in students’ English writing, teacher written corrective feedback has been an important part of English writing teaching. But the effectiveness of teacher feedback in improving students’ English writing has been controversial. The empirical studies in China are relatively limited compared to those abroad, especially concerning which type of teacher written corrective feedback can improve the writing of EST learners effectively. In addition, few researches are carried out to examine the effects of written corrective feedback on the improvement of writing accuracy of students at different levels. What’s more, participants in these experiments are mainly chosen from non-English major college students and high school students in China, and the proportion of junior high school students is small. Based on the above, this paper will study the effects of two types of written corrective feedback (indirect and direct) on learners’writing accuracy of different English levels in Chinese junior high school.Participants of the empirical study are seventy-two Grade Eight students in Wenhai junior high school,36 of them are from the class of high level English, while another 36 students are from the class of low level English conversely. Within more than two months, the participants from the classes are divided into three groups respectively--two experimental groups and one control group, each of which receives the indirect corrective feedback, direct corrective feedback and no feedback in the 8 pieces of compositions assigned by their teacher in the process of the experiment and revises their first draft of each composition according to the feedback the teacher provides. SPSS 16.0 will be used in this paper to compare and analyze the results of writing accuracy in the pretest and post-test in order to examine the effects of indirect and direct corrective feedback on the students’ writing accuracy.The major findings of this empirical study are presented in the following:first, written corrective feedback (indirect and direct) is effective in improving the students’ accuracy in English writing; second, for students at high levels, there are not significant differences between the effects of indirect corrective feedback and direct corrective feedback on their English writing accuracy; third, for students at low levels, direct corrective feedback leads to a little more improvements in students’ writing accuracy than indirect corrective feedback.