The Effects Of Teacher Written Corrective Feedback On Non-English Majors’ Writing Self-efficacy

Since the1990s, many researchers paid attention to the effect of teacher feedbackon learners’ language acquisition within the framework of the Second LanguageAcquisition Theory. Internationally, as a new form of teaching method, teacher writtencorrective feedback has caused wide concern over the recent years, and it plays animportant role in students’ writing between teachers and students’ interaction. Students’writing self-efficacy will impact on their self-confidence in the process of writing.Nowadays, there are many studies about the relationship between teacher feedback andstudents’ writing accuracy, and a lot of studies aim to explore the relationship betweenwriting self-efficacy and writing performance. However, few studies are found tospecially explore the relationship between teacher written corrective feedback and non-English majors’ writing self-efficacy. Therefore, based on Rod Ellis’(2009) categorizationof teacher written corrective feedback, the purpose of the study is to explore the influenceof different teacher written corrective feedback on non-English majors’ writing self-efficacy.This is an empirical research based on Social Cognitive Theory and InteractionHypothesis. The participants are sophomore non-English majors in Shenyang NormalUniversity. Sixty students are randomly chosen from two natural classes. Instruments fordata collection include writing self-efficacy questionnaire, reflective journals andinterviews. This study is carried out four stages as follows:Firstly,60participants were divided into four groups randomly, and each group has15students. There are three experimental groups and one control group. A pre-test questionnaire is conducted to explore the levels of students’ writing self-efficacy.Secondly, during the experiment, all students wrote six compositions and the researcherprovided three experimental group different types of corrective feedback; the “no-feedback” control group was in self-correction. After finishing each two compositions,they were asked to write reflective journals. Thirdly, after experiment, a post-testquestionnaire is conducted, and eight students were interviewed. Finally, the data isanalyzed by SPSS.The present study comes to the following conclusions:(1) non-English majors’generally have lower writing self-efficacy. Teacher written corrective feedback indeedinfluences non-English majors’ writing self-efficacy, and the relationship is that the muchmore written corrective feedback teachers gave, the more progress may students have.(2)Students like detailed and suggestive writing comment. They hope that teachers couldgive them suggestions about structure, main ideas, words, sentence making and grammarmistakes of the composition. They would like to read euphemistic comments and oftenget praise from teachers, and it may help them build up their writing confidence.(3) Allthree types of teacher corrective feedbacks have positive effect on students’ writing self-efficacy. The conclusion is that indirect corrective feedback has a great influence on non-English majors’ writing self-efficacy; metalinguistic corrective feedback and directcorrective feedback take the second and third place.Overall, this study has proved that teacher written corrective feedback has a positiveimpact on non-English majors’ writing self-efficacy, especially the indirect feedback. Inaddition, all these findings will make significant contributions to both language pedagogyand Second Language Acquisition.