An Investigation Into College Students' Preference For Teachers' Written Feedback On Their Writing From The Perspective Of Individual Differences

Teachers' written feedback has been studied for more than 30 years.Over these three decades,researchers have probed into the effectiveness of various types of written corrective feedback by a comprehensive utilization of teaching experiments,questionnaire studies,qualitative studies,and theoretical discussion and argumentation.However,to date,no consensus has been convincingly reached and opposition to corrective feedback can still be spotted.The reason for this,according to some researchers(e.g.Sheen,2011),is the flaw in experiment design,that is,there is a lack of the control group.More recent studies have nearly all paid special attention to experiment design,but they still yield inconsistent results and sometimes the results are even opposite to each other.The reason for this inconsistency in the experiment results is that there are literally far too many factors at work in the process between students' initial writing and later writings after their taking in the teachers' feedback.Among these factors,students' individual differences are of extreme significance.When talking about the research into individual differences,Ellis(2010),holds that the vast majority of the studies on corrective feedback,whether oral or written,have failed to take the subjects' individual differences into consideration and these studies merely focus on the correlation between some specific corrective strategies and the subjects' study results.This neglect in research deserves our attention,as different students will perhaps react somewhat differently to corrective feedback due to their individual differences.In addition,the research into students' preference for teachers' written feedback is also comparatively rare.What is students'preference for their teachers' written feedback?Which types of feedback can students accept more easily?What is the correlation between students' individual differences and their preference for teachers' written feedback?All these questions deserve our special attention.When we get to know the students' individual differences and their preference,our feedback will certainly be more effective.Based on the present situation in the research field,this study aims to investigate students'preference for teachers' written feedback and explore the possible correlation between students'individual differences and this preference.The written feedback in this study mainly refers to teachers' written corrective feedback on students' mistakes in their writing and teachers' comment at the end of the students' writing,as these two types of feedback are comparatively the most traditional and common.In order to find out the individual differences that may influence the students' preference for teachers' written feedback,a questionnaire was designed and later adjusted in both its content and ways of questioning after an initial investigation and a pilot study of a small scale.Eventually,such individual differences as the gender,the grade the students are in,students' self-respect,students' belief in autonomous learning,students' autonomous learning ability,students' motivation for English learning and their scores in CET Band Four were finalized and then a questionnaire study was carried out among 558 subjects from grade 2014 and 2016 dual-major students who are from seven different universities and take English as their second major in Huazhong University of Science and Technology.The results of the investigation reveal that the preference of the 558 subjects for the six types of teachers' written corrective feedback on their mistakes in writing can be divided into significantly different levels.The most popular type is the one listed in item A2,that is,the mistake is not only identified but also corrected by the teacher,e.g.has went(gone).The least popular ones are the types listed in item A1 and A5:A1=The mistake is only marked but not corrected,e.g.has went;A5=Without marking the mistake,the teacher offers only a hint about it by writing a sign in the margin to indicate that there is at least one mistake in this line,e.g....has went...*(*is the indication of the mistake).Additionally,the research results show that students also assign significantly different weights to the six items that can be included in the teacher's comment at the end of their writing.They view the comment on the structure and content of their writing as the most important while they consider the comment on punctuation and spelling to be of the least significance.The paper probes into such preference based on the theory of zone of proximal development(ZPD).Besides the rankings of the preference for these two types of important written feedback,the statistics from other items of the questionnaire also demonstrate directly or indirectly students' other preference for teachers' written feedback,e.g.their preference for the clarity of the feedback,how teachers mark their mistakes,the language of the comment and the concreteness of the comment.In addition,the correlation studies between students' preference for the teachers' written feedback and their individual differences indicate that,taking the 558 subjects as a whole group,statistically speaking,there are no direct significant correlations between students' preference for the six types of written corrective feedback on the mistakes in their writing and the students'individual differences.There are also no direct significant correlations between students'preference for the six items that can be included in the comment and the students' individual differences.However,in certain special groups,on certain items of the questionnaire,there are a few direct or indirect significant correlations between students' preference and their individual difference,which,however are not high(all the values of the coefficients are less than 0.4).Such results are of positive value to teachers' correcting and commenting on students' writing.Since students' self-respect,belief in autonomous learning,autonomous learning ability,motivation for English learning and their scores in CET Band Four are not statistically significantly related to their preference for teachers' written corrective feedback and comment,the teachers,when they are not so sure about the students' individual differences and preference,can make use of the findings in this study and adopt certain types of written feedback to achieve the optimal balance between teachers' efforts and students' gains.