Effects Of Different Feedback Methods On Chinese College ESL Learners’ Narrative Writing

The present study aims to explore the effects of two feedback methods—error correction and model essays on Chinese college ESL learners’narrative writing in terms of fluency, accuracy and complexity. It is an empirical study involving both the quantitative and the qualitative research methods. The thesis aims to answer the following three questions:(1) Does the feedback of teacher error correction have significant influence on the improvement of students’ writing fluency, accuracy and complexity?(2) Does the use of model essays as feedback have significant influence on the improvement of students’ writing fluency, accuracy and complexity?(3) Is there any significant difference between the effects of error correction and model essays?92non-English major students from Gansu Agricultural University participated in a nine-week experiment. They were divided into three groups to receive no feedback, error correction feedback and model essays as feedback respectively. After ensuring the equivalence of their English writing proficiency in the pretest, all the92subjects completed narrative picture writings for five times. Every task was finished after experiencing three stages:composing stage, comparing stage and rewriting stage. In the comparing stage, subjects were required to compare their own draft written in composing stage with the feedback they received in the comparing stage, and then moved on to rewriting stage. An immediate posttest and a delayed posttest were conducted to test their improvements. At last, a questionnaire survey was organized.All the subjects’compositions finished in the two posttests were measured in terms of fluency, accuracy, syntactic complexity and lexical variety. The data collected were analyzed by SPSS11.5package. The results showed that error correction feedback had significant influence on the immediate improvement of accuracy, while using model essays as feedback could not only affect the immediate improvement of accuracy dramatically, but also have significant effects on the immediate development of fluency and syntactic complexity. However, neither of the two feedback methods had distinct effect on students’delayed improvement of fluency, accuracy and complexity. The results of the questionnaires confirmed the experiment results.Finally, the research results were discussed and explained on the basis of some related theories (Output Hypothesis, Noticing Hypothesis, Process Writing Theory and Skehan’s Three Aspects of Language Production), the research findings of previous studies and the questionnaire results.The present study might be enlightening for future studies concerning feedback to writing and helpful for L2teachers and students to improve L2writing. But there were, inevitably, some limitations, especially in the subjects, the task type, the experimental time and the measures adopted, which still await further research.