A Study Of Effects Of Negative Feedback On English Writing Improvement

Writing is the most complicated and difficult skill in English learning, and English learners often have more problems and spend more energy in it than in other skills. While writing not only occupies a large proportion in all kinds of English tests, but also has a pivotal status in practical application. No matter what levels the students are at English proficiency, they can't avoid errors in their writing. What kind of teaching method the teacher provides students to improve their English writing skills has been a focus in the field of English teaching and learning.As early as in 1967, regarding writing learning, Corder proposed that the improvement of classroom learning should be based on the error correction, which is a kind of feedback given by the teacher to the students'errors. Whether feedbacks could have a positive effect on improving writing ability is a controversial issue. Many researchers, such as Long, Inagaki & Ortega(1998), Oliver(1995) and White(1991), Aljaaferh, A., J. P. Lantolf (1994), Ayoun (2001) have researched on this topic, they generally think that negative feedback can produce long-term effect on learners' writing system. In recent years, domestic scholars also begin to pay attention to the role of the feedback in college English writing, regarding the forms of feedback, the positive and negative ones, many scholars, such as Ma Huifang, Shen Chongyue (2008), Yu Ying (2007), Xu Huijun (2008) have different opinions towards their effects, and there is also a lack of empirical research. Therefore, this study aims to examine the effect of different forms of feedback on college English writing, as well as the students'accepting orientation to the various forms of feedback, so as to provide some enlightenment to the teaching of English writing. This study selects two forms of negative feedback-explicit negative feedback (i.e. underlining the errors and plus correction) and implicit negative feedback (i.e., underlining the errors without correction) as the research target, and compares their effects on the error correction in writing. This study selects 80 non-English major students of Harbin Institute of Technology as the research objects, they were given titles to write in class, followed by researcher's correction in the two forms of feedback, then to write on a similar title, at last the error rate of these two compositions would be compared.Results obtained by means of SPSS 16.0 indicate: both explicit and implicit negative feedback basically have the same effects on error correction for students on the whole. After the students receive the feedbacks, the verb errors decreased. For students of advanced level, both explicit and implicit negative feedback have the effects on error correction, and there is no significant difference between the two feedbacks, and for students of intermediate level, the results are the same, when using explicit negative feedback, it has the effect of error correction, and the effects are basically the same for better and lower students, the result is more or less the same for these two kinds of students when applying implicit negative feedback.A conclusion from the above results is drawn, both implicit negative feedback and explicit negative feedback can help the non-English major students to reduce the errors in writing effectively, and further to improve their English writing. These two forms of feedback are also the widely adopted ones by English teachers, and accepted by the students according to the results of the questionnaire. The results which are consistent with the related research conception are that both explicit and implicit negative feedback can reduce the errors in the compositions of students of different levels, and improve their ability of writing, and also these two kinds of forms are accepted by the students.According to the above conclusions, this paper puts forward the following suggestions: Since the implicit negative feedback only underline the students' errors, and there is no need to provide the correct answers, it can save a lot of time when the teachers correcting compositions. From this, we suggest the teachers select the methods of implicit negative feedback, which can save the teachers'workload, while at the same time improve the students'English writing ability.