An Empirical Study On Effects Of Teacher Feedback On Vocational College Students' English Writing

Among the four skills (reading, speaking, listening, writing), writing may be the most demanding task in English learning, so EFL learners often find it more boring and harder to make progress in writing skills than in other skills in language learning. Giving teacher feedback is a crucial procedure in the writing course. It is worth knowing the effects of teacher feedback. With teacher feedback having been studied and analyzed by a great number of researchers, yet, the studies on the effects of different teacher feedback are scarcely explored in China's EFL context.This present study focuses on the effects of three types of teacher feedback on EFL students'writing. The following three types are addressed:a) the focus on form; b) the focus on content; and c) the focus on both form and content.The present study deals with the following questions:a) What types of teacher feedback are the students in urgent need of?b) Will these different types of teacher feedback affect EFL students'writing performance? And how?c) Which type of teacher feedback brings significant change in improving EFL students'writing?A study over four months was carried out among 90 English majors (juniors) from Jiangxi Science and Technology Normal University. The instruments of the research included the questionnaire, writing tasks and an interview. These subjects were assigned to three treatment groups, and a different type of teacher feedback as mentioned was given to each group.Through the four-month experiment, each student was required to complete three compositions. Since each student finished one piece of composition and then rewrote it in accordance to the teacher feedback in the following week, they had altogether 6 pieces of writing during the whole experiment. Data from the formal scores and the content scores of the first composition and the final composition (revised) were collected and analyzed. SPSS 11.5 was employed to analyze the results of the data with one-way ANOVA and Paired-Samples T-Test being used as the statistical instruments. During the experiment, a questionnaire was conducted to find out students'attitudes and reactions to different forms of teacher feedback. At the end of the research, a semi-structured interview was carried out.The results of the quantitative and qualitative study showed that most students expected to receive detailed teacher feedback in the hope of making improvement on their writing. After the experiment, the group, which received form-focused feedback, was effective in reducing error rating but ineffective in elevating content quality; the group, which received content-focused feedback, was slightly effective in error reduction and ineffective in the improvement of EFL students'writing content quality; the group, which received content-form combined feedback, was effective in enhancing both error reduction and content quality.The following chapters are included in this thesis:Chapter 1 gives a general introduction to the whole thesis. The background and purposes are displayed in this part in which the outline of the whole thesis can also be briefly seen.Chapter 2 provides a review of the relevant theories and findings laying foundation for this specific study. At first, the definition and classification of teacher feedback is illustrated, and then the relevant theories on teacher feedback including behaviorist perspective and related theories, noticing hypothesis and process-oriented writing theory are discussed in this part. It reveals that it is of vital importance for EFL learners to obtain teacher feedbacks which exert positive effects on their writing accuracy and quality in English writing. Besides, relevant studies of teacher feedback in the Chinese context and abroad are also reviewed in this chapter.Chapter 3 describes the methodology of the research, including the research questions, participants, instruments and experimental procedure. Questionnaire is designed to find out students'attitude and reaction to different forms of teacher feedback. Interview aims to examine the EFL students'feedback and expectation on the effects of teacher feedback. The writing tasks are designed to probe whether and how different forms of teacher feedback affect EFL learners'writing accuracy and quality in Chinese context. The responses to the Students'Attitude Questionnaire are analyzed on basis of the frequency and percentage. SPSS 11.5 is employed to analyze the results of the data, and one-way ANOVA and Paired Samples T-Test are used as the statistical instruments.Chapter 4 reports the results of the questionnaire, the interview and the writing tasks. In terms of different types of teacher feedback, students of relatively good mastery of English would rather take the content-related feedback, while those who have less competitive English proficiency are bound to pay more attention to the form-related feedback; yet, the form-content combined feedback remains to be the widely accepted type of teacher feedback in the class. Regarding the effects of different teacher feedbacks, form-focused feedback was effective in improving EFL students'writing formal accuracy but ineffective in elevating content quality; content-focused feedback cannot improve the content quality of their writing significantly; form-content combined feedback apparently turns out to be the most effective type, as both formal accuracy and content quality gains could easily be revealed in the group which receives the very kind of teacher feedback.Chapter 5 is the conclusion of this study. At the end of the study, the limitations of the present study are discussed and suggestions on teaching English writing are put forward.