The Effects Of Different Teacher Written Feedback Types On The Accuracy And Complexity Of ESL Students' Writing

Many earlier researches have pointed out that teacher written feedback has an important effect on English learners'writing improvement, but it is still a heated topic for language teachers that what effect different teacher feedback types have on writing accuracy and complexity, and on the accuracy of different error categories. On the basis of previous studies, the present study mainly examines the effects of different teacher written feedback types on ESL learners'writing accuracy and complexity.The present research aims to investigate, for five error categories (verb, noun ending, article, word choice, and sentence structure), which kind of teacher feedback(direct correction, underlining with description, description, and underlining) has the best effect in terms of learners'writing accuracy, complexity, and the accuracy of each kind of error category.Before the present experiment, accuracy and complexity of participants'writings were measured, and it was confirmed that there was no significant statistical difference in their writing accuracy and complexity, on the basis of which all participants were divided into four experimental groups and one control group. The whole experiment lasted 12 weeks. In the first week, the pretest on the accuracy of five error categories and writing complexity was administered, and the posttest was conducted in the last week. Each of the four experimental groups was given four different feedback types respectively:1. Direct correction.2. Underlining with description.3. Description.4. Underlining. The control group received no feedback. During the process of the experiment, the researcher demanded participants to write a composition on a given topic in 20 minutes every week, and the composition was collected by the teacher and the feedback was given by the researcher. And in the following week, the teacher returned compositions and required participants to correct errors in 10 minutes, and to write a new composition in 20 minutes. The researcher calculated the accuracy and complexity scores of participants from five groups both in the pretest and in the posttest, and analyzed the data with SPSS11.5. The results showed that:1. Direct correction did the best in improving accuracy when five error categories were analyzed as a whole.2. When the five categories were analyzed respectively, direct correction played the best in improving the accuracy of verb, noun ending and article, while underlining with description feedback did better than other feedback types in improving the accuracy of word choice and sentence structure.3. Participants in all five groups improved significantly in writing complexity, but no data analysis revealed which kind of feedback did the best in improving students'writing complexity.Through the interview, it was found that most students preferred direct correction feedback.Results above reveal that direct correction feedback has the best effects on writing accuracy and complexity among the four feedback types.The present study provides empirical evidence for teachers in terms of giving feedback for different error categories, and it is a reference to improving the accuracy and complexity of students'writing, too.