The Effects Of Different Teacher Feedback On Chinese College Students' English Writing

Many earlier researches have showed that teacher feedback has positive impacts on learners'accuracy in their writing; and surveys of students'perspective about teacher feedback have consistently demonstrated that L2students hold a positive view towards teacher feedback. Due to the different parameters in different researches, the findings are not conclusive and thus difficult to be applied to English writing context in China, which stimulates the researcher to investigate the effects of teacher feedback in English writing teaching. In addition, some researches show that teacher-student individual conference can be used to improve the effects of coded feedback. Thus this paper attempts to examine the impacts of two modes of teacher feedback with the teacher-student individual conference. The research questions in this study are:1. What is the difference between error feedback with underlining and corresponding explanation and error feedback with underlining in improving students'ability to self-edit their papers in a long term?2. What is the difference between error feedback with underlining and corresponding explanation and error feedback with underlining in improving students'writing accuracy in a long term?A longitudinal study over a semester is designed. During the15-week semester's experimental study87non-English sophomores coming from Shaanxi Normal University were involved. The subjects in the experimental group are provided error feedback with corresponding explicit explanation while for the control group, they receive error feedback with underlining the errors. Besides, all the subjects are encouraged to ask questions concerning teacher feedback and correct their errors in a fifteen-minute session of teacher-student individual conference.This study focuses on the variation of students'self-editing ability and writing accuracy. The learners'error correction ability is measured by counting the percentages of students'successful editing of errors labeled by their teachers and the accuracy is measured by counting errors per clause. Compared with the control group, this study finds that before treatment, there is no significant difference between the experimental and control group in self-editing ability and writing accuracy. However, after the different teacher feedback of15weeks, the data shows the subjects in the experimental group outperform the control group and there is significant difference between them.Apart from the quantitative study, at the end of the research a questionnaire is also administered to examine students'perspectives and opinions of the value of teacher feedback. The questionnaire includes10questions on how students view teacher feedback, the effect of two modes of treatment, effect of revision, suggestions for teachers'future work. The data displays the similar findings with the quantitative study.This study offers new evidence to support the practice of teacher feedback on pedagogical ground. First, the teacher-student individual conference can promote the comprehension of teacher feedback. Second, the students should value teacher feedback and improve the accuracy through error correction. Finally, the teacher can adopt different modes of teacher feedback according to students'individual needs.The limitations of the present study and suggestions for the future researches are put forward at the end of the thesis.