A Study On The Influence Of Teacher Feedback On College Students’ Second Language Writing

With the popularization of Process Approach,more and more teachers have put their focus on students’ writing process.As an indispensable part of teaching process of writing,relevant issues concerning teacher feedback(TF)have been paid special attention by many scholars.Although a considerable number of studies have been made by both domestic and foreign scholars,the effectiveness of TF is still remains a controversial issue.In recent decades,although there are a wide variety of comparative studies of different forms of feedback,most of these studies have been carried out to compare the differences of peer feedback(PF)and TF.However,up till now,fewer studies have been made to investigate the differences of effects of direct feedback(DF)and indirect feedback(IF).As far as the DF and IF are concerned,there has been no consensus on which one is more conducive to improving the students’ second language(L2)writing.Therefore,this study attempts to investigate the influence of teacher’s DF and IF on L2 writing of college students by adopting quantitative and qualitative research methods in order to improve the effects of TF.This thesis aims to examine the following three questions:(1)Is there any significant difference in the effects of teacher’s DF and IF on students’ L2 writing performance? Which one is more effective in improving students’ L2 writing proficiency?(2)What are the students’ acceptable degree and corrective effect?(3)What are the factors affecting students’ corrective behavior?In this study,the teaching experiment has been conducted on the freshmen non-English majors in one provincial university for 16 weeks.32 students are divided into two groups with sixteen students in each group.One group is the DF and the other is the IF.During the process of writing training,the students are required to write English compositions according to teacher’s requirements.Then DF and IF are adopted to correct students’ compositions.Simultaneously,teachers record the numbers and types of errors in students’ compositions.Finally,teachers return the compositions with DF and IF to students,and require them to revise and submit again.The effects of DF and IF on students’ writing are explored according to the numbers of errors in compositions and writing scores in the pretest and posttest.This study takes writing test,questionnaire and semi-structured interview as the instruments,and the data collected are analyzed statistically by SPSS 22.0.The research results are as follows:(1)Both DF and IF can help students improve their L2 writing proficiency.Teacher’s IF is more effective for high-level learners,but neither DF nor IF have any significant difference for low-level learners;(2)Students’ acceptable degree is gradually increasing and the corrective effect is getting better to both DF and IF.The two forms of feedback have significant effects on reducing numbers of different types of errors.DF is more effective in reducing errors of digression and syntax;IF is significant in reducing morphological,synonymous,collocation and spelling errors;(3)Students’ corrective behavior is affected by a variety of factors,such as learners’ personal factors,intermediary tools,modifying goals,rules,learning community and division of labor.Based on the relevant theories and the above research results,some pedagogical suggestions are put forward for teachers and students.In addition,limitations of this study and suggestions for further studies are proposed.