Empirical Study On Effect Of Teacher Written Feedback On English Writing Of Vocational College Students

Teacher written feedback is one of the important parts in the English writing teaching of vocational colleges. It has the great significance in the improvement of effectiveness of writing teaching and the students’writing proficiency. The scholars at home and abroad have conducted a lot of researches on the effects of teacher written feedback, but the problems on effects of teacher written feedback in vocational English teaching are controversial and the empirical studies about the effects of teacher written feedback are still insufficient. The present study is based on the theories of writing teaching and the second language acquisition. It aims to study the effect of different teacher written feedbacks on students’writing proficiency and accuracy, and the students’attitudes and preferences on teacher written feedback. The implications about the vocational English writing teaching are propounded.This experiment lasted 16 weeks and applied experimental method and questionnaire survey. The subjects were 80 non-English major sophomores in vocational college in Xi’an. These students were from two parallel classes which were divided into experimental class and control class. There were 40 students in the experiment class. The errors in these students’ writings were given direct feedback. The control class contained 40 students and the errors in these students’writings were given indirect feedback. The teacher written comments on content and structure were given in students’writings in both classes. The holistic scores, analytic scores and linguistic error numbers in all the valid compositions were analyzed by SPSS 19.0. In the end of the semester, the subjects were given questionnaires about their attitudes and preferences on teacher written feedback. Through Independent-samples T Test, Paired-samples T Test and One-way ANOVA, this thesis obtained the following results:(1) The results of the experiment show that both the experimental class and control class improved their writing proficiency in different degree after receiving different teacher written feedbacks. The direct written feedback significantly improves students’writing proficiency, decrease their error rate and enhance their language accuracy more significantly than indirect written feedback. (2) Both direct and indirect feedbacks have the positive effects on the analytic scores of grammar, vocabulary and mechanics, but the effectiveness of direct feedback is more significant than indirect feedback in the three aspects. Direct feedback has more significant effects on the grammar than indirect feedback. (3) The teacher written comments on content and structure have the positive effects on the content and structure in students’ writings. (4) According to the results of questionnaire, most students tend to direct feedback and the teacher written comments on structure. The present study also put forwards some suggestions for foreign language writing.