A Study On Teachers’ Written Corrective Feedback

This article mainly investigates the immediate and delayed effect of teachers’written corrective feedback (WCF) on writing accuracy. The delayed effect wasspecifically divided into near-transfer effect and far-transfer effect.2parallel classesparticipated in this study: class1(31students) was randomly chosen as theexperimental group and class2(33students) as the control group. Both groupscompleted3different writing tasks. The first writing task was designed to probe theimmediate effect of teachers’ WCF. The experimental group were required to correcttheir writings according to teachers’ WCF. The analysis of their corrections shows thatthey successfully corrected33.7%errors; the paired samples T test of the languagescores before and after their self corrections shows there is significant difference. Theresults indicate that teachers’ WCF has immediate effect. The second writing task wascarried out to investigate the near-transfer effect of teachers’ WCF: compared with thefirst writing, the experimental group made remarkable progress; compared with thecontrol group, they were significantly superior. But the analysis of the results revealsthat this significant difference should be attributed to students’ self correction, whichmeans that teachers’ WCF does not have near-transfer effect. And the third writingwas conducted to explore the far-transfer effect of teachers’ WCF: compared with thesecond writing, the experimental group made no improvement and no significantdifference was found; compared with the control group, they did not make anyoutperformance. This means that teachers’ WCF has no far-transfer effect.In addition, this article investigates students’ attitude towards teachers’ WCF andthe effect of it. The analysis of questionnaires and interviews reveals that:1) allstudents expect to receive teachers’ WCF;2)65%students believe in the immediate effect of teachers’ WCF;3)70%students believe in the transfer effect of teachers’WCF;4) only39%students believe in the far-transfer effect of teachers’ WCF.