A Comparative Study Between The Types Of Teachers’ Feedback And The Students’ Preferences On English Writing Of Senior High School

As one of the four basic language skills, writing is an indispensible patr of Englishteaching. English writing is an important skill for language output, however, the wirtingproficiency of students in senior high school is not satisfactory. Among the factors thatinfluence the writing proifciency of students, teachers，wirtten feedback is an important one.Teachers’ wirtten feedback plays an important role in the improvement of students’ writingability by helping them to realize the problems exist in their writings and prompting them tomodify and rewrite. How to give effective wirtten feedback to improve the st’udents Englishwriting ability is a primary issue for each researcher and teacher. Therefore, investigatingwhat types of feedback the senior high school English teachers adopt and exploirng students’preferences toward the teacher feedback is very necessary. The study makes a survey into thedifferences between teacher feedback and students’ preferences hoping to help teachers toadjust the teaching method，maximize the eiffcacy of feedback and improve the writingteaching.The study attempts to investigate whether teachers’ feedback can meet students’ needsand to explore whether there are discrepancies between teacher feedback and students’preferences by qualitative and quantitative research methods rfom ways of feedback taken byteacher, fo, thecus of feedback，error correction and comments. The author chooses randomly348students and36senior high school teachers in Grade1from six senior high schoolsincluding two municipal key public schools, two ordinary public schools and two pirvateschools respectively in Jin Cheng city, Shan Xi province as the subjects of the research. Thethesis aims to answer the following questions:(1) What are teachers and students’ attitudestowards written feedback?(2) What types of feedback do teachers adopt in practical teaching?(3) What kinds of feedback do students prefer?(4) Are there any discrepancies between teacher feedback and students5preferences? If the answer is “yes，，，what are they?Detailed analysis of quantitative and qualitative research yield the final findings asfollows:(1)When it comes to the ways of feedback taken by teacher，both teachers and studentsattach much more importance to teacher feedback. The discrepancy is most students preferteachers to give them face-to-face feedback and do not expect teachers to correct somewritings selectively, however, few teachers correct students’ wirtings face to face and theyusually correct some writings selectively due to the limit of time and energy.(2)As for teacher feedback focus, there are discrepancies between teachers and students.The students pay their most attention to language form, followed by content and structure，buttheir teachers put the most emphasis on the feedback on language form, followed by structureand content. The distinct difference is students prefer teachers to attach importance to thecontent，however, few teachers to do so.(3)As for error correction, most students hope that teachers can not only correct alltheir errors, but also mark the errors and error types while most teachers only mark the errorswith correcting some of them selectively. And also, some students hope teachers to correctsome of their mistakes selectively to improve their ability of self-correction. In addition, asmall part of students expect teachers to mark the errors or indicate the problems in theirwritings without modifying them directly. Therefore, teachers should adopt different ways oferror correction based on students’ individual differences.(4)When it comes to the comment, most students prefer teachers to give them positiveand concrete comments while few teachers meet students’ needs. In addition, most teacherstend to give feedback on students’ oirginal work as the ifnal one. Moreover，they seldomrequest students to rewrite and few students rewrite according to the teachers’ feedback.Based on the above ifndings，in order to maximize the eiffcacy of feedback andimprove students5writing level, teachers should strengthen the mutual communication withstudents and adjust their method of feedback to meet students’ needs. And also, teachersshould adopt different types of feedback according to students’ individual differences.i...