A Research On English Majors’ Responses To Different Types Of Teacher Written Feedback

Teacher written feedback is the main means of improving the effectiveness of English writing. Teacher written feedback can not only promote students’writing revision and develop their English writing ability, but also stimulate and maintain students’motivation of and interest in English writing. In recent decades, many researchers have researched on the efficacy of writing feedback from the angle of teacher, which has obtained great achievements. However, students’feedback to teacher written feedback, that is, students’learning needs has been ignored. Therefore, the present study makes an analysis of teacher written feedback. At the same time, the author also has researched much on the students’response to different teacher written feedback with English majors as the subjects, hoping to find out the appropriate types of teacher written feedback to meet the learners’needs, and offering some feasible and achievable suggestions for English writing teaching.In this study, the primary means of data collecting is questionnaire and sample analysis. The participants are146English major students from Guangxi Normal University. The Questionnaire for the English major students is based on the Questionnaire of students’ feedback on teacher written feedback and the characters of teacher written feedback, and the author makes some necessary adjustment by taking some senior scholars’suggestions into consideration. This questionnaire measures three aspect, they are:learners’attitudes towards English written feedback; learners’impression of teachers’actual written feedback; students’ expectation of different teacher written feedback. The essay samples are drawn from students’ daily exercises to investigate the teachers’actual written feedback in practice.The present study addresses the following three questions:(1) What are the learners’attitudes towards teacher written feedback?(2) What are the differences between teacher written feedback and students’impressions of teacher written feedback?(3) What are the students’responses to the future teacher written feedback? The study results show that:(1) Students are interested in teacher written feedback.(2) The results of essay samples as well as the students’questionnaire show that teachers prefer to adopt form-feedback rather than content-feedback, and the focuses of form-feedback are grammar mistakes. In form-feedback, using direct ways to give form-feedback outweighs using indirect ways.(3) In students’response to teacher written feedback, students expect to get content-feedback rather than form-feedback. In content-feedback, positive evaluation and feedback on language use are the most desirable for students. But receiving form-feedback in indirect ways is mostly welcomed by students.Based on the above findings, the author puts forward some suggestions for English writing teaching and learning to enhance the efficacy of teacher written feedback in English writing class.For English writing teachers, the author puts forwards four advice, they are:(1) mastering the principles and strategies of teacher written feedback;(2) focusing on students’affective experiences in writing commentary;(3) developing topics for writing on the basis of students’ interests and daily life; and (4) establishing multiple feedback models in English writing class.For learners, they are supposed to do the following things. Firstly, they should have positive attitudes towards language errors; Secondly, they should develop the competence of self-feedback in English writing learning.