A Study Of Students’ Attitudes To Teachers’ Written Mitigated Feedback In L2 Writing

Writing is a focus of English learning and a difficulty of teaching.How to give feedback to students’ writings and what role feedback plays in students’ writings has always been an important research topic for scholars at home and abroad.Studies on the effects of different types of feedback on different grades,genders,and students with different levels have been widely carried out,but the research have mostly concentrated on university students and relatively few studies have focused on the attitudes of Senior One students to mitigated feedback.In order to better understand the students’ true attitudes towards mitigated feedback,this research conducted a data collection of two compositions and interviews on ten senior one students with different English levels in a senior high school in Shenzhen to answer the following three research questions:(1).What are students’ attitudes towards their teachers’ written mitigated feedback in their writings?(2).What types of mitigated feedback do students find most helpful?(3).Are there any differences of students’ attitudes with regard to their different writing levels?If so,what may be the differences?The results of the two interviews show that most students prefer mitigated feedback and fully recognize the positive role of praise,suggestions,etc.;students with different English levels need different types of mitigated feedback: the higher the English level,the greater need for thinking space and reflective thinking and the more tendency for being provided with suggestions of thinking;the weaker,the more for directional guidance and encouragement,the greater need for appropriate examples so as to avoid misunderstandings.Based on the results of the study,this article also proposes suggestions for English teachers of senior high school in providing mitigated feedback in the teaching process of writing: respect the students’ subjectivity of learning;pay attention to the individual differences of students;the use of different types of mitigated feedback should mainly focus on how to help students better understand and use the feedback and the provision of mitigated feedback should be flexible to achieve good results.