An Empirical Study Of Teacher Written-feedback In Writing Instruction In China

Teacher-written-feedback is the focus of theoretical researches in EFL/ESL writing instruction. Numerous studies are on whether teacher written-feedback is effective or not, how to provide effective feedback, and what the focus of teacher written-feedback should be. Yet few studies are on teacher self-assessments of their written-feedback. Actually, in China, virtually no study is on this aspect. Thus, the research questions of current research are:(1) how much local and global written-feedback teachers give and whether teachers give different amount of feedback depending on the scores of students; (2) how teacher self-assessments and student perceptions of feedback coordinate; (3)how teacher self-assessments match their actual performance; (4) whether teacher self-assessments adhere to their beliefs and whether teacher actual feedback practices adhere to their beliefs; (5) What teachers' response to the findings of the study is. And in teachers'view, what factors might lead to the findings of the above stated research questions.The findings indicate that teachers put much more emphasis on local feedback than global feedback and teachers do not provide different amount of feedback depending on students' scores; teacher self-assessments match student perceptions about half of the time, and teachers tend to make overestimations when there is mismatch; compared with their actual written-feedback performance, teachers tend to overestimate the amount of feedback given both to global issues and local issues; Teacher beliefs and their self-assessments generally match well. However teacher self-assessments suggest that teachers appear to realize they attach greater importance to the categories of grammar and vocabulary than to that of content. Teacher belief and their actual performance don't coordinate well; no teacher is surprised by the findings of research question 1. More than half of teachers state that they are surprised by the findings of research question 2 and 3. All the teachers state they are surprised by the discrepancy between teacher actual performance and teacher beliefs when all teachers are concerned. But when the individual teacher is concerned, they give different views. All of them state they lack formal training in how to give feedback effectively. Examination culture, student expectation, student English proficiency and time constraint are viewed as important factors leading to the findings by the teachers.