The Role Of Teacher Feedback On Students' Noticing On The Form Of Mixed Type Of Unreal Conditional

Many applied linguistic researchers have showed great concern to the noticing function of output since Swain puts forward the Output Hypothesis. According to the Output Hypothesis, output has three functions: the noticing function, hypothesis testing function and metalinguistic function. Researches on the noticing function find that output facilitates learners in noticing the problems in their interlanguage. Qi and Lapkin (2001) advocate in their study that how to improve the noticing quality is a question, which has to be addressed immediately.Previous studies have revealed that learners' noticing can be facilitated by feedback, but views on teacher feedback are rather contentious. The author of this dissertation holds that teacher feedback may assist learners to notice linguistic forms and detailed teacher feedback will have a stronger effect in improving learners' noticing quality. Based on the researches on noticing function of output and the studies on teacher feedback, the current study regards accuracy as the criterion to judge noticing quality in order to tackle the following questions: (1) What influence does teacher feedback have on learners' quality of noticing, positive or negative? (2) Will the noticing quality of learners' be improved at a different rate if they are provided with a different type teacher feedback?The form of mixed type of unreal conditional was selected as the target form (TF) of this study because the author found in her teaching practice that students always confused it with the past hypothetical. The subjects were selected through a grammar test and a writing test, then took part in a three-staged writing on the same topic. At the first stage, the participants were asked to write with the target form according to the given directions; then they produced a second draft with a model essay input presented; afterwards the teacher responded to the second drafts of the two groups respectively with detailed and brief feedback, and finally asked the students to revise the errors of their second drafts and produce the third draft, t-test was used to analyze the grammar test and the writing test, and Mann-Whitney U tests as well as Wilconxon-signed-ranks test were used to analyze data collected from Draft 2 and Draft 3. The findings obtained from the experiment are: (1) Teacher feedback has a positive effect on learners' noticing quality and different types of teacher feedback facilitate the learners' noticing quality at a different rate; and (2) Learners with detailed teacher feedback achieve better noticingquality than those with brief feedback. This study provided strong support to the use of teacher feedback in writing classes. At the end of this study, limitations are discussed.