A Study On The Effectiveness Of Teacher 's Feedback Form And Sharpness In Junior English Writing

Writing, one of the basic skills of language usage, serves as a necessary and important part in junior English teaching. As the primary teaching technique, corrective feedback plays a key role in the enhancement of the learners writing ability. With the development of process-oriented writing methodology, studies about feedback form and its explicitness issue have gained its popularity. However, researches targeting the junior middle school students are relatively in smaller numbers. Besides, most of the researchers study the related issues in their shoes. Therefore, this paper makes the attempt to explore the research questions from the learners’ perspectives.This paper consists of one questionnaire and one empirical study. Forty experimental subjects are from the same class of grade seven in one of the junior middle schools in Nanjing. The questionnaire is intended to look into the students’ attitudes towards writing and teacher corrective feedback, the self-evaluation of their grammar and writing levels, and also their preferences toward the feedback forms. At the same time, the empirical study is aimed at exploring the relationship between feedback forms, explicitness and students’performances. Apart from the primary concern, the paper also takes a preliminary exploration of whether the different error types or the different grammar backgrounds of the students have effects on the students’performances.The results of the questionnaire show that most of the students expect and value the corrective feedbacks from their teacher. In addition, they have a general idea about their grammatical problems and show different attitudes towards the treatable and untreatable error types. As for the preference issue the majority prefers to implicit feedback forms and call for autonomy in self-editing process.The three targeted feedback forms are chosen according to the students’ preferences, popularity among teachers and the corrective information they contained. The criteria of the performance are not only the correction of the errors, but also the detection of the errors. What’s more, this paper takes the learner’s perspective into consideration. The findings are:(1) Different feedback forms do affect the learners’ perception degrees;(2) There is no significance difference in error correction among different feedback forms, whereas the error detection rates are not the case;(3) The learners’perception degrees are in strong relation to the student’s performances;(4) Error detection and correction are affected by the error types and their grammar backgrounds.In view of the above, the author shed lights on the teaching of writing. Firstly, teachers should encourage the students to correct the errors by themselves. Secondly, students’detection of the error should be given priority over error correction. Thirdly, the choice of the feedback form should according to the students’grammar backgrounds and the error types.