Effects Of Different Types Of Teacher Written Feedback On The Writing Of College Non-English Majors

Writing instruction is very important in foreign language teaching, while feedback is an important part in writing instruction. In China, teacher feedback is widely used in English writing instruction. So far, the study of the effects of teacher feedback on student writing has drawn more and more attention of researches abroad and at home.This study aims to explore the effects of three types of teacher written feedback—content feedback, form feedback and the combination of content and form feedback—on students writing. The specific research questions are:(1) Are there any significant improvements in the quality of students'writings after receiving different teacher written feedback over a semester?(2) If any, in which aspects does students'performance show the most changes?(3) What are students'attitude, preference, perceptions and expectations to different types of teacher feedback?The present study chose 30 non-English major students who have the relatively similar English writing level, chosen from three classes in different departments, to participate in the experiment, which lasted about 14 weeks. They are divided into three groups and received different types of teacher written feedback: the first group (G1) receiving content-focused feedback only, the second group (G2) receiving form-focused feedback only, and third group (G3) receiving both content-focused and form-focused feedback combined from the author. During this research semester, the students were asked to write 13 pieces of compositions on 7 given topics. Statistical procedure—SPSS17.0—is used to analyze the data collected from the scores of the first and the seventh compositions. All three groups were asked to fill out a piece of questionnaire immediately after the experiment. Based on the analysis of data, the main findings of this research are as follows:(1) Most students expect to receive teacher written feedback. As for different types of teacher written feedback, half of them prefer the form and content combined feedback.(2) Three types of teacher written feedback are effective in improving student writing quality, and the form-content combined feedback appears to be the most effective type.(3) The students who received both the form and content feedback improved most in grammar, lexicon, local organization, the content quality, and form accuracy. And those who received form feedback improved much in grammar, lexicon, local organization and form accuracy. While those who received content feedback improved a little in lexicon, local organization, form accuracy and the content quality. Three groups all fail to achieve significant improvement on the content quality of students'writing.The present study demonstrates that teacher written feedback plays an important role in improving students'writing ability and it may shed light on foreign language writing instruction though some limitations still exist.