A Study On The Effects Of Corrective Feedback On Enhancing High Schoolers’ English Writing Accuracy

Playing an indispensable role in English writing, teacher written corrective feedback has been an issue of interest to classroom practitioners and researchers. While there is growing empirical studies abroad being devoted to exploring the effectiveness of teacher corrective feedback on learners’ English writing and revision process, no consensus has been reached on its efficacy on writing accuracy and quality improvement. Overall, the issue of whether teacher corrective feedback is effective and which feedback mode is more beneficial continues to be somewhat controversial.To date, the relevant empirical evidence concerning the effectiveness of teacher corrective feedback is scarce at home, moreover, most of which remain at college or university level. The present study seeks to examine the effects of two different types of teacher written corrective feedback (direct error correction plus teacher-student conference and underlined indirect feedback plus error codes) on the improvement of senior high school students’ English writing accuracy in Chinese context.Fifty-four EFL Grade Two students, chosen from Wu Han University affiliated school participated in the current study. The participants were randomly assigned to two equal groups according to the error rate of the pretest writing assignment. The study lasted for twelve weeks, during which each participant was required to write six in-class argumentative essays on different topics and then each revised his first draft at least once according to the given teacher written feedback in the next class. Different teacher feedback were adopted during the experimental period. The first group employed the direct feedback in combination with teacher-student conference, in which the teacher pointed out the errors directly, wrote the correct language forms and structures immediately and provided detailed explanation necessarily. The second group used underlined indirect feedback with conventional error codes. More precisely, the teacher would not provide the correct forms but give some hints concerning the location of the faulty items and its error categories.A questionnaire was distributed to find out students’ attitudes toward the provided feedback at the end of the empirical study. Afterwards semi-structured interviews were arranged to examine the consistency of the questionnaire results and gain a more deep insight into students’evaluation of the given teacher feedback. For convenience’s sake, the quantitative data were analyzed by means of SPSS 20.0, in which Independent-Sample T Test and Paired-Sample T Test were adopted to examine the difference between the two groups before and after the feedback options.The major findings yielded from the present study are briefly summarized as follows:Firstly, teacher written corrective feedback is effective in enhancing senior high school students’ writing accuracy.Secondly, the given feedback strategies exert different effects on enhancing the English writing accuracy level of senior high students with different language proficiency For advanced and low-proficient learners, direct error correction plus T-S conferencing strategy contributes to more accuracy progress, while average learners gain more significant improvements in writing accuracy under the guidance of the underlined indirect feedback in combination with error codes mode.Thirdly, the quantitative and qualitative results shows that most students expect teachers to provide feedback on their errors and they find teacher feedback helpful in improving their writing accuracy.In light of these findings, the present study provides the empirical evidence about the effectiveness of teacher written feedback on the improvement of senior high school students’ writing accuracy. It also suggests some pedagogical implications for how to provide effective teacher written corrective feedback in Chinese senior high school English writing teaching.