An Experimental Study On Vocational College Students’ Self-correction In English Wirting

Writing plays a useful part in reflecting students’comprehensive proficiency of English asone of the five basic language skills (listening, speaking, reading, writing and translating).Since writing is an important productive competence of language, the improvement of students’writing ability has always been attracting many scholars and teachers’attention. It’s commonand inevitable to commit errors in English writing and reasonable, effective correction can beconductive to promoting students’writing ability. Therefore, it’s quite necessary and essential tocorrect students’errors in writing.The traditional writing method, such as the product-oriented approach to English writingteaching tends to employ teacher correction, which often kills students’enthusiasm andautonomy in English learning and leads to a time-consuming and ineffective effect. As a newlycorrection, peer correction is still viewed at an early stage with skepticism and doubts and can’tcause much productive revision of students’writing. In recent years, as an equally newlycorrective method focused on the Learner-centered teaching concept, self-correction has beendrawing more and more attention of researchers and teachers at home and abroad. Manyresearches carried out on self-correction have proved that self-correction applied to Englishwriting has unique advantages. In contrast to teacher correction and peer correction,self-correction can facilitate students’autonomous learning and make them be more responsiblefor their study. Besides, it’s the least likely face threatening action and will not cause students’frustrating, negative feeling. Furthermore, students can clearly realize their true strengths anddefects in English learning through self-correction and go on learning with an explicit learningtarget to make much more progress. On the other hand, teachers’burden can be reduced a lotthrough self-correction. All in all, both teachers and students can benefit a lot from adoptingself-correction in English writing.Writing has always been a weak point in Chinese English teaching for many years. MostChinese students have various difficulties in English writing. And Chinese vocational collegestudents are especially bad at writing due to their low English comprehensive proficiency.Self-correction has been employed and investigated in many senior high schools and universities in recent years. The results of application and research of self-correction showsome positive and helpful information. English writing teaching in vocational colleges has a lotin common with that in senior high schools and universities. In addition, related research invocational college students’self-correction in English writing is relatively limited. Therefore,it’s essential to carry out an empirical study on self-correction applied to English writing ofvocational college students and the empirical study owns positive theoretical and practicalsignificance.Viewed from the Learner-centered teaching concept, the present study reviews relatedliterature at home and abroad based on related theories such as Error Analysis and Input andOutput Hypothesis. Thus, an empirical study is carried out with reference to domestic andforeign literature and research results and the basic requirements of vocational college Englishwriting teaching. This empirical study is conducted in Shandong Radio and TelevisionUniversity and lasts one semester. Two parallel classes of 102 sophomores majoring inaccounting computerization in School of Economics and Management participate in this studyfrom September, 2011 to January, 2012. This study makes an analysis of the feasibility andeffectiveness of self-correction adopted in vocation college students’English writing. The maininstruments employed involve the pre-test writing, the post-test writing, the writing assignments,the questionnaire and SPSS16.0, etc. The data collected from the experiment are analyzedthrough SPSS 16.0 and major findings are gained as follows:1) Self-correction is effective in promoting vocational college students’English writingproficiency according to the results of the experiment.2) Both self-correction and teacher correction can bring improvements in vocationalcollege students’writing. Therefore, in general, the two corrective methods are all helpful andeffective in promoting vocational college students’English writing ability.3) Some differences about the effects produced by self-correction and teacher correctionare found when considering different error categories respectively. Compared to teachercorrection, self-correction is more effective in correcting lexical, grammatical errors anddiscourse errors. But teacher correction is particularly effective in correcting content errors andmechanics errors.In this thesis, vocational college students are proved to be capable of self-correcting errors in English writing and self-correction is conductive to improving their English writing ability.Thus, self-correction can be employed for English writing teaching in vocational college andvocational college students should be given more confidence and chances to play an active,effective role in the process of error correction in their English writing.