A Case Study On The Effects Of Teacher Written Corrective Feedback On The Accuracy Of English Writing Of Chinese High School Students

Writing, as one of the basic skills of learning a language,comprehensively reflects students’ language proficiency and plays asignificant role in English instruction as well as language testing.Meanwhile it is generally considered as the most difficult skill for a goodmastery of vocabulary and grammar does not indicate excellent writingcapacity. Nunan(1991) emphasize that writing is a difficult andcomplicated process of psychological cognition, thought creation as wellas social communication both for native speakers and foreign or secondlanguage learners. Since the introduction of process writing approach,teacher feedback has become a crucial element in the teaching of writing.Although no agreement has been reached concerning its effectiveness onthe improvement of writing accuracy, its significance is widelyacknowledged by teachers. This study, based on the previous research,tries to explore the effectiveness of teacher written corrective feedback(TWCF), teacher direct feedback and indirect feedback on theimprovement of writing accuracy, as well as students’ attitude towardsTWCF.This study lasts for eight weeks and the participates are60studentsfrom grade one of senior high and their English teacher. The students are from two parallel classes and are divided into three groups, twoexperimental groups receiving direct and indirect feedback and onecontrol group receiving no feedback. All students are required to finish4compositions and three revised drafts. Then the errors per hundred wordsof the four writings as well as the revised drafts are carefully collectedand analyzed using one-way ANOVA and paired sample t-test bySPSS17.0to examine the difference among the three groups as well aseach group before and after the empirical study. Finally, at the end of theexperiment, the questionnaires are given to the respondents to check theattitude students hold towards English writing and the TWCF.The findings of the empirical study and the questionnaires arepresented in the following part:First, the TWCF can significantly improve students’ writingaccuracy.Second, direct feedback is more effective than indirect feedback onthe improvement of students’ writing accuracy.Finally, most of the students expect to receive teacher feedback toimprove their writing accuracy and prefer direct feedback.This study offers some experimental data to the proposition whetherTWCF can improve students’ writing accuracy and also provides somepedagogical implications.