A Study On The Effects Of Form-focused Feedback And Content-focused Feedback On Students’ Writing In Senior High School

Giving feedback is a crucial procedure in the process-oriented writing approach.Various studies have investigated the effects of different feedbacks in ESL learning,there has been little research conducted to examine the effects of different types of teacher feedback on students’ writing in senior high school in China.The current research was designed to investigate on effects of two types of teacher feedback, which differ in the focus of the feedback: a) the focus on form b)the focus on content. Qualitative and quantitative measures were employed in order to:a) examine students’ attitude and perception toward different types of teacher feedback; b) determine which type of feedback is more effective in improving students’ writing.A quasi-experimental study over a semester was designed. The sample of study consisted of 60 students in Grade1 from Fengcheng Senior High School in Jiangxi Province. These 60 subjects were assigned to two experimental groups by the scores of the pre-test, 30 students per group, each group received one form of feedback, one was form-focused feedback, and the other was content-focused feedback. At the end of the semester, every student had finished 8 compositions, with corresponding feedback and revised their compositions after reading the teacher feedback. Data was collected from the holistic scores, form scores and the content scores of the first composition and the last composition. At the end of the research, the questionnaire was conducted to collect the students’ views about the teacher feedback and their improvement in writing. SPSS was performed in order to compare the scores.The quantitative and qualitative results showed that:(1) From the questionnaire, students expected to receive teacher feedback in the hope of making improvement on their writing. As for the two different types of teacher feedback, students preferred form-focused.(2) Form-focused feedback made a great effect on improving students’ writing quality, but content-focused feedback failed to achieve significant improvement on the quality of students’ writing. In the light of the current level of students’ knowledge,high school students tend to make more mistakes on grammar and lexical. That may be the reason why form-focused feedback is more effective. On the other hand, the organization of the English composition in the high school is relatively simple andcontent of their compositions is easy for them to handle.This study sheds some light on English writing and English teaching in EFL learning and teaching environment. In light of these findings, it is advisable that teachers provide more form-focused feedback for high school students, and provide multiple types of feedback according to students’ ability and provide special writing course and writing skills.