An Investigation Into The Impact Of Direct And Indirect Feedback On Student Writers

As known to everyone, there are four basic skills about English leaning, they are listening, speaking, reading and writing, among the four skills, writing is one of the most difficult ones to improve. Writing, as a kind of output, requires involvement from students on one hand; on the other hand, it needs the response from teacher to correct the drafts. Responding to student writing is considered as essential for the development of student writing competence, though it needs the largest investment of time from writing instructors (Ferris & Hedgcock,2005). However, the number of researches about how the feedback influence L2 students' language accuracy and how teachers should provide more effective feedback can be counted, especially at home.This qualitative research studies how feedback, both direct and indirect, influences L2 students'improvement of language accuracy. It investigated non-English major students'reactions to and uses of teacher written feedback over one semester. Taking a case study approach, this study followed one college English teacher and eight first-year electrical engineering & automation students in DUM over a twelve-week college English course. Multiple sources of data were collected, including classroom observation, students'writing assignments and the followed revised version, teacher written feedback and interview transcription. The research findings suggest that feedback does benefit L2 students a lot in language accuracy improvement, but there some difference between the effectiveness of direct and indirect feedback; students generally valued and incorporated teacher written feedback into revision, considering feedback important and helpful; yet variations existed among individual students; students'attitudes towards the type and style of feedback affects the acceptance and incorporation of feedback.