Study Of Error Feedback On The Writings Of Chinese College English Learners

Writing plays an important role in second language acquisition and learning to write is considered as the most complex task. The provision of feedback to students' writing isn't uncommon and has long been used in teaching writing. But issues concerning whether feedback works as expected, what type of feedback teachers should provide and how learners make use of the feedback remain controversial. Besides, the importance of noticing as a cognitive process in the second language acquisition has been increasingly recognized by many applied linguistic researchers in the past decade. However, how noticing affects the feedback processing and what impact such noticing has on the improvement of students' writing still need to be investigated. Our research is expected to shed some light on this issue.In a three-phase composition-comparison-revision writing task, we have examined the effectiveness of teacher feedback with a control group, made the comparison of two types of feedback--the direct error correction and the teacher conferencing, and investigated the effect of noticing in the writing process on students' improvement of accuracy in their writing. Thirty Chinese sophomore English majors who learn English as a Foreign Language in Shanghai Applied Technology College have participated in our research. They were divided into three groups, each of which has ten students who have received non-feedback, direct error correction and teacher conferencing respectively on their drafts before their revisions. SPSS software is adopted to analyze participants' accuracy changes in their writing performance and questionnaires are used to explore participants' noticing process.We have found that compared with the control group, participants with teacher feedback achieved greater improvement of their written accuracy, and specifically participants in the teacher conferencing group have outperformed those in the direct error correction group. Written accuracy was measured by error changes made by learners from their first draft to the revision. We further generalized that in our research teacher feedback was effective and specifically teacher conferencing was more effective than direct error correction.The analysis of the questionnaire has indicated that there is an association between what participants noticed in the feedback and the changes they made in the subsequent revision. Those noticed linguistic forms are more likely to be changed in the revision. Form-focused feedback provides learners the opportunity to notice the gap between what they've learned and the target linguistic form.The study designed to examine the effects of different types of teacher feedback and noticing on the accuracy improvement of students'writing can be of great significance to the teaching of English writing in the China-specific context. Pedagogical implications are conducive to working out a set of interactive models of writing teaching and helping intensify the reform of China's foreign language teaching.