A Study Of The Effects Of Teacher Feedback On Foreign Language Writing

Providing feedback to student writing and investigating its effects on writers are important topics for second or foreign language writing teachers and researchers. The potential value of teacher feedback has been highlighted by the widespread adoption of process approach and sociocultural theory for many years abroad.This study aims to resolve some problems concerning the effects of content feedback and form feedback, hoping to improve the teaching and learning of foreign language writing in China. It is a study on the effects of two different types of teacher feedback on EFL writing. 60 non-English majors from a dependent college of Jiangxi Province participated the quasi-experiment, which lasted four weeks. They were divided into two groups, 30 subjects per group. Each group received one form of feedback on their writings from the author, and then was required to revise their compositions after reading teacher feedback. At the end of the experiment, the questionnaire was distributed to the subjects and collected during a regular lesson. The questionnaire synthesized the factors of students'perspectives: the views on revision, the views on teacher feedback, and views on their improvements. The main findings of this research are as follows:1. There are differences on the improvements when students receive different feedback. Form feedback helps much more significantly on improving accuracy than content feedback does, while students receiving content feedback gained much more progress on fluency than those receiving the form feedback did. The difference on the complexity between two groups was not significant. These suggest that the two types of feedback can help students achieve their writing, and should gain the same importance.2. From the questionnaire, most subjects hold positive views on the correction and revision. In their opinion, the teacher feedback is useful and has helped a lot in their writing. But they usually spend too little time in correction and revision to improve their writing. These indicate that teacher feedback should not only point out the errors or some advantages and disadvantages, but cultivate the habits of revision and the ability to improve writings independently.The significance of this research lies in its effort to call for greater attention to the adaptability of both form and content feedback and the habits of revision. Further research could investigate how to take the more advantages of the two types of teacher feedback in foreign language writing.