Teacher Feedback And English Writing Teaching In High Schools

Writing is one of the important means for people to communicate and also a necessary skill for EFL learners to master. Writing appears in most English tests and foreign language learners are required to write fluently and appropriately. It is also useful in real life. Writing can be employed by people in different countries to keep in contact with each other. In China, New English Curriculum Standards gives a new demand to writing.Among the four skills (listening, speaking, reading and writing), writing is one of the concerns for EFL teachers in high schools in English teaching. Students' writing ability is the focus in teaching of writing. Based on the researches and discussions about the feedback to the students' writings, this paper tries to discuss about the relationship between the feedback to writings and improvement of the writing ability. Meanwhile, it tries to answer the following questions through the experiment, the questionnaire and interviews:1. What teacher feedback will be more useful to improve the writing ability of the students, focusing on content or form?2. What feedback will students in high schools be in favor of?3. How to perfect the feedback to English writing in high schools?Through the experiment on 25 students, questionnaires on 150students and the interview on 9 students in the second grade of No1 Middle School of Pingyuan, we can conclude:1. The method of feedback (whether to focus on content or form) is effective.2. Without any intervention from the teachers, many students do receive higher scores on grammar and content of their rewrites than on their original compositions.3. Teacher feedback has much effect on the students, especially those average and weak students.4. They also prefer teachers to give more guidance during the writing process.5. Rewriting is an effective means to improve the quality of writing and students' writing abilities.Moreover, through the findings of the questionnaire and interviews about the teachers' comments to the students, we find that the students hope to get systematic comments from teachers, which may serve as reference, but they dislike critical comments, which they think will discourage their interest in learning English.