The Effectiveness Of Teacher Written Feedback On Senior High School Students' English Writing

In the four skills of listening, speaking, reading and writing, English writing is the hardest one for high school students. Many factors affect their writing level, including writing skills, mother tongue writing abilities, writing knowledge, education background and English levels. This paper will mainly discuss the effect and influence of teachers written feedback on senior high school students'writing.In the field of English teaching, teacher feedback is a major research topic and it has been focused in the past 30 years. The main focus is the function of teacher feedback. On the one hand, some representative researchers including Fathman and Whalley claim that teachers'comments, suggestions and corrections have great significance and can obviously affect students'corrections. But on the other hand, some doubts are cast on teacher feedback, for example, Zamel (1995) believes that teacher feedback is in disorder and too arbitrary. Truscott (1996) even believes that the feedback about grammar errors yields no effects. In sum, there have been many researches on the efficiency of feedback abroad; however, their findings are quite different. Some findings are even opposite. Researches in China have been confined to theories, with deliberation and discussion as the focus, but empirical studies are rare. So this paper takes an empirical research concerning teacher feedback on high school English writing, by conducting an experiment in NO.1 Senior High School in Zhumadian City. The writer aims to help the improvement of feedback and the further study of English for students.This research use Process Writing Approach, Social-cultural theory, and Noticing Hypothesis as the main theoretical rationales. The writer selects 90 Grade 3 students of Zhumadian Senior High School to conduct a 16-week-English writing experiment. These students were assigned into 3 well-matched groups according to their English levels. Each group contains 10 top students,10 average students and 10 students with English learning difficulties. These students basically represent the overall qualities of high school English level. The first simulation test in Grade 3 showed that the students'English in the 3 groups is more or less on the same level. They are taught by one experienced teacher. And the instruction texts, contents and methods are all the same. The only difference is different teacher feedback types adopted in these 3 groups. The first group adopts direct feedback. The teacher writes the correct form beside errors. The second group uses indirect feedback by using underlines. That is, teachers just underline the errors without giving the right forms. The third group is indirect feedback with conventional encodings to mark errors to remind students but don't give the right forms. The research questions are as follows:(1)With the influence of teacher written feedback, have any changes taken place in the overall students'writing ability among the three groups? If yes, which group makes the rapidest progress? If no,what are the main causes?(2) What are the differences while using 3 kinds of feedback to correct mistakes?(3) Which kind of feedback is more effective to improve the writing ability of students at different levels in each group?From the perspective of form, contrastive research is adopted. From the perspective of research methods, process-product paradigm is used, which combines text analysis, interviews, questionnaires and basic material analysis and is hoped to be more practical and comprehensive than other researches concerning feedback. The students'views, elicited after the study, support the findings obtained from the analysis of the quantitative data.According to the questionnaires and the date analysis, we can make the following conclusions:(1) There is no significant difference among these three groups before and after the experiment. That is because all of them make progress in their English writing ability after receiving three different feedbacks.(2) There are obvious differences between different feedbacks and their effects on students'correction of errors. Direct feedback has the most obvious effect on the correction of interlingual errors; Indirect feedback with underlines has clear advantages in modifying students careless mistakes while indirect feedback with encoding marks is more suitable to correct intralingual errors.(3) Students with different English levels make different progress in each group. The top students agree with the indirect feedback by using underlines. The indirect feedback with conventional encodings is fit for the average students. And the students with English learning difficulties prefer the direct feedback.(4) The effectiveness of teacher feedback is determined by whether students react to the corrections and reviews. Rewriting is an effective way to fulfill this purpose. Teachers should encourage students to rewrite their compositions over and over again, build up good writing habits and advocate the cycle of"writing-feedback-correction".This research mainly emphasizes receiving teacher written feedback can improve students'writing quality and different kinds of feedback make difference. Teachers should adjust feedback for different types of students. There is no magic bullet that will be just the right thing for all students all the time.