The Effects Of Teacher Error Underlining And Error Coding Feedback On Senior Students’ Error Correction In English Writing

Writing is always attached great importance to when a student is learning English. Now the NECS and the NMET set relatively high standards for senior students in English writing. However, the students’ writing skill is far from satisfactory. So, it is very important, especially for senior English teachers, to improve their students’ writing skill. Besides students’ own efforts, the teacher written corrective feedback is undoubtedly a very effective way to help improve senior students’ writing skill. It’s common practice for teachers to adopt the teacher error underlining corrective feedback because of the heavy burden of teaching and pressure of insufficient teaching hours. But the authors believes that the teacher error coding corrective feedback is more efficient in helping the senior students realize and correct their errors in writing, and hence it is more efficient in improving students’ writing skill. That’s why the author wants to compare the different effects of these two types of corrective feedback on senior students’ error correction in this research.A lot of the empirical studies abroad and at home are conducted in universities or in English-speaking environments but few of them have made a comparison between the differential effects of the teacher error underlining corrective feedback and error coding corrective feedback on senior students’ error correction in their writing in China. Hence this research focuses on comparing how these two types of teacher written corrective feedback affect Chinese senior students’ error correction in English writing and it also tries to find out which type of the teacher written corrective feedback the beginners in writing like better. The approach, involving two whole-class writing tests, a questionnaire and the interviews, overcomes the weakness of using writing tests or a questionnaire as a single instrument to compare the differential effects of the teacher error underlining feedback and coding feedback on students’ error correction in their writing. The whole class writing tests serve as the primary tool to collect data. The follow-up questionnaire and interviews are then conducted to know the participants’ preference for the teacher written corrective feedback and the reason for their failure in error correction in their subsequent drafts. The data from the writing tests, the questionnaire and the interviews all reveal that the teacher error coding corrective feedback is far more efficient in helping the senior students correct their errors, especially in lexical errors, and the overwhelming majority of senior students like this type of the teacher written corrective feedback.Firstly, the results of the whole research contribute to a better understanding of the error correction in senior English writing. Secondly, the results also contribute to senior English teachers choosing a better way to give written corrective feedback in English writing when they take the different students’ conditions into consideration. Thirdly, this research helps to narrow the gap between China and foreign countries in reserch on comparisons between the different effects of the teacher error underling and error coding on senior students’ error correction. Finally, some practical suggestions for a better teacher written corrective feedback in English writing and future research are also identified.