A Study Of Status Quo Of Teachers’ Written Feedback On Students’ English Writing In Senior High School

Written feedback is an indispensable part in the process of English writing teaching,building an important bridge for effective communication between teachers and students.Effective written feedback can not only provide suggestions for students’ improvement timely,but also further stimulate learners’ interest in learning and improve their independent learning ability in the process.Consequently,how to improve the effectiveness of written feedback has become a topic in English writing teaching.Nevertheless,most of the research background abroad is based on ESL,which cannot be directly applied to the practice of English composition teaching in China.At the same time,most domestic researches focus on the teachers’ oral feedback and error correction or students’ reaction and preference to error correction in classroom.Most of the research objects are college students,and the research results of teachers’ written feedback in high school English writing are few.Although these studies have certain guiding value for the current English writing teaching practice in domestic environment,they cannot be fully adapted to the writing teaching in senior high schools in China due to the differences in research objects and environment.Based on the background of domestic high school English teaching practice,the researches of status quo and the cause of it,the author explores the method and strategy of enhancing the efficiency of written feedback,aiming to help teachers to written feedback have a more clear and more comprehensive understanding and promoting teachers provide students with more effective feedback in writing.Under the guidance of Schmidt’s Noticing Hypothesis and Krashen’s Input Hypothesis,this study targeted 200 students and 8 English teachers in grade one of a key high school in Chengdu and analyzed students’ compositions,questionnaire survey and interview to investigate the status quo of teacher’s written feedback in high school English writing.In the preparation stage,the author first collected students’ writing samples,and the whole process lasted three and a half months(from March to June 15,2019).Finally,the author collected a total of 393 paper compositions,of which 388 were valid samples.Then 200 students were given questionnaires,of which 200 were valid.At last,9 students and 8 teachers are selected for interviews.The research mainly addresses the following two questions :(1)what is the status quo of written feedback in high school English writing? Involving strategies and focus of feedback;(2)What are the reactions of students to teachers’ written feedback,involving their attitude,feedback,and preference?The results shows that:(1)teachers’ written feedback focuses on grammar,vocabulary and other forms of language,but ignores the content of the article.(2)in terms of the strategy of feedback,indirect feedback is given priority to,and single use of line,circle feedback form.The comments are too brief,lack of encouraging words,and have few suggestions for improving the level of compositions and specific opinions for the content of the article;(3)students particularly value teachers’ written feedback,and it is generally believed that teachers’ written feedback on error correction plays a certain role in improving their writing level;about the focus of feedback,students expect to get more guidance on language form;As for the feedback strategy,students expect teachers to comprehensively use all kinds of feedback methods to indicate all the errors in the composition and make some modification selectively;in terms of commentary feedback,students expect more specific,more detailed and individually targeted suggestions for future improvement.On the basis of sorting out the research results at home and abroad,and combining the above research and analysis of status quo,the author proposes the following enlightenment: in English writing teaching,teachers should pay more attention to the feedback of the content,and the combination of language form feedback and content feedback is easier to be accepted by students.Students of different levels have different demand on the way and content of written feedback.Consequently,teachers should adopt personalized written feedback according to students’ characteristics,learning motivation,writing level and other factors.Teachers should pay attention to students’ response to feedback,adjust their feedback strategies in time,and provide more diversified written feedback to students.