The Impact Of Teacher Feedback On Higher Vocational Student’s English Writing Ability

With the development of economy in our society and the expansion of internationalcommunication in the world trade, English has become the most useful language and one ofthe professional characteristics for modern qualified employees. The aims of highervocational college English writing mostly focus on various application writing, such asbusiness letters, memos, business orders and invitation letters.As far as the process approach in foreign language writing, feedback refers to theprocess of input information that reader provides to revise the writers’draft .The purpose offeedback is to assist the writer to express their thoughts accurately and achieve the goals ofcommutation .Teachers’feedback not only facilitates the learners’writing abilities but alsohelps them comprehensively understand and evaluates their own language skills.This study is based on the theory of the process approach, output hypothesis andinteraction theory. The research investigates the vocational college students’writingproficiency and demonstrates the impact of teachers’feedback on students’writing ability.The process approach is conducted in both classes English writing construction. Theresearcher collects all the grades of eight times compositions and calculates the mean scoresof each class to illustrate if teachers’feedback results in significant differences on students’writing ability. The researcher indicates the errors in the compositions of experimental classand provides feedback by using error codes; as for the control class compositions, theresearcher just gives a comment on the writing without written feedback. The whole test lasts8 weeks and the participants of both classes are assigned to complete the same eight writingtasks in a given time. The researcher analyzes the mean scores then put them into EXCEL tofind the P value. The P value is under 0.01 which suggests there is significant differencebetween both classes on the accuracy of English writing. The researcher also conducts a questionnaire and an interview to make the research scientific and reliable.The study shows that the students who have received error feedback over a period oftime do improve their language proficiency in the aspect of accuracy. The results alsoindicates that most vocational students have weakness in English writing proficiency, thelarge proportion of the participants would prefer and accept teachers’feedback and thecorrection of grammar errors. The lower proficiency learners would pay more attention onfeedback concerning grammar, word spelling whereas the higher level proficiency learnersconcentrate their attention on feedback regarding the mechanics and organization of theirwriting. The higher level proficiency English learners desire negative feedback whereas lowerlevel proficiency learners are in favor of positive feedback. Based on the results of the study,this thesis tends to provide feasible measures to help students develop good habits of writingand guide them to further study in the future.