An Investigation Into The Effectiveness Of Chinese And International Teachers’ Written Feedback On Non-English Majors’ Improvement Of English Writing

Teacher feedback plays a critical role in discovering and solving students’academic English writing problems. However, Chinese teachers, as non-nativespeakers of English, most of the time are giving feedback on grammatical andmechanic mistakes. This research attempts to investigate the respectivecharacteristics of Chinese teacher feedback and international teacher feedback aswell as the effectiveness of the two sources of feedback. A case study combining ateaching experiment was conducted in this research. This research probes into threeresearch questions:1. What are the respective characteristics of the Chinese teacher and theinternational teachers’ written feedback?2. What are the students’ perceptions of the Chinese teacher and the internationalteachers’ written feedback respectively?3. To what extent do the Chinese teacher and the international teachers’ writtenfeedback influence students’ improvement of English writing?The research incorporated both the quantitative and qualitative study. Theresearch adopted the comparative study of pair classes. The students in theinternational teacher feedback class (the ITF-class) received the feedback of theinternational teacher, while the students in the Chinese teacher feedback class (theCTF-class) received the feedback of the Chinese teacher (not the instructor). Theresearch gave a contrastive analysis to the written feedback of the Chinese teacher andthe international teacher to find out the respective characteristics and differences.Questionnaires and interviews were conducted to solicit students’ perceptions of theChinese teacher and the international teacher feedback. By the end of the semester,the students in both classes participated in a post-test. The data showed that comparedwith the CTF-class students, the students in the ITF-class improved significantly inEnglish writing ability.The data collected demonstrated that both sources of feedback have advantagesand disadvantages. Students’ perceptions of feedback showed that the internationalteacher feedback played positive role not only in improving students’ revision, butalso in enhancing students’ English writing motivation, improving their autonomouslearning ability and strengthening their intercultural consciousness. As for theeffectiveness of the Chinese teacher and the international teacher feedback on improving students’ English writing, the students in the ITF-class obtained higherscores in post-test for holistic rating. The students in the ITF-class gained higherscores especially in content, organization and sentence structure. The improvement invocabulary and idiomaticity is not significant, while the mean score in grammar islower than the CTF-class. The data collected through questionnaires and in-depthinterviews demonstrated that the Chinese teacher feedback gave more help inimproving grammar, while the international teacher feedback helped more in the other5categories.The research results demonstrated that the international teacher feedback canimprove students’ English writing ability. The students can construct more effectiveand appropriate discourse in intercultural context and better understand theconstruction mechanism of English writing. The international teacher feedback modelcan be applied to the English writing instruction of non-English majors. Furthermore,Chinese teachers and international teachers can cooperate in giving feedback.This research compared the Chinese teacher feedback and international teacherfeedback to find out their respective characteristics. The research seeks to feed backon the English writing instruction and improve the effectiveness of Chinese Englishteachers’ feedback. Furthermore, according to students’ interviews, the students’perception of the international teacher’s involvement into feedback demonstrated thatthis practice is effective and feasible. The method could be adopted by the collegeEnglish writing course.