A Study On The Correlation Between Corrective Feedback And College English Writing Proficiency Under The ZPD Theory

Among the four basic abilities in English, writing is a vital and difficult element in English learning and teaching. Different kinds of errors can be found in learners’ writing. In order to deal with this situation, a lot of feedback was given by teachers. In recent years, a large amount of research concerning different corrective feedback has been conducted in the field of second language acquisition. Generally speaking, they are divided into explicit and implicit feedback. It seems that a general consequence among the most of researchers concern are that feedback is effective to English writing and explicit feedback is more effective than implicit feedback at the same time.The author aims to examine whether corrective feedback under ZPD theory is more effective than orally explicit feedback via an experimental study. Quantitative and qualitative methods were adopted in this study. The twenty freshmen whose major is navigation in Dalian Maritime University were selected as the subjects. They were divided into an experimental group and a control group. Each group has ten people. They were assigned a pre-test. Then different kinds of corrective feedback were given to different groups for sixteen weeks. The experimental group was received corrective feedback from task fulfillment, communicative quality and vocabulary and sentence structure perspective under ZPD theory. But the control group was adopted by orally explicit feedback. The result of post-test revealed that the students in the experimental group outperformed those in the control group after quantitative and qualitative analysis. The corrective feedback under ZPD theory is more effective to help college students to improve their writing proficiency. Apart form the quantitative and qualitative method in this study; interview was also employed to support the conclusion analysis. By analyzing the interview students held a positive attitude towards corrective feedback under ZPD theory. The students have a deep memory about the errors they have made. And these errors can be corrected efficiently in their next compositions. The study is of significance both in theoretical and practical aspect. Theoretically, the study testified the effects of corrective feedback under ZPD theory are effective to improve the students’writing proficiency. In practice, this new teaching method will promote the college English writing teaching.