An Empirical Study: On Students' Noticing In Teacher Feedback In L2 Wrting

In producing the L2, a learner will on occasion become aware of (i.e. notice) a linguistic problem (brought to his/her attention either by external feedback or internal feedback). That is noticing may occur because of either internal feedback or external feedback which may prompt. (Swain & Lapkin, 1995) This empirical study has investigated learners'noticing on teacher feedback. The subjects were ten students of grade three in senior school. They were randomly divided into two groups—direct feedback group and indirect feedback group. The research questions of the study are:1.What do students notice when they read teacher feedback? 2. What do they do when they notice a problem? 3. Which feedback can better improve noticing quality (to notice the gap between IL and TL), direct feedback or indirect feedback? Three data sets were collected:think-aloud protocols, retrospective interview, students'drafts and teacher feedback. Both quantitative and qualitative analyses were involved.The findings suggest that:1. most teacher feedback is noticed by students, including evaluation and correction. Students are more focused on correction, especially grammatical correction. Besides, in producing output, students do notice the gap between IL and TL, and the gaps are particularly noticed in reading teacher feedback. 2. Both direct and indirect feedback provoke cognitive process of students, but the thinking modes are different. The direct feedback group involves comparing the IL and TL and trying to find a reason for correction, while indirect feedback is mainly for guided learning, and students in indirect group involved guided learning and problem solving. Seeing from this aspect, indirect feedback is more thought-provoking, which may form students' independent learning ability.3. The noticing quality of direct feedback is superior to indirect feedback group. That is to say, direct feedback which has an outstanding effect in one-round feedback is easier for students to understand and get a conclusion.