The Teachers’ Corrective Feedback: An Empirical Study Of High School Students’ English Writing Practice

Listening, speaking, reading and writing are constant themes in the language teaching. It is commonly accepted that writing practice is a time-consuming but least effective task for teachers. However,English teachers in China insist on requiring their students to finish a large amount of writing exercise. The reason is that since the senior students in China, who are exam-takers, need to finish the last part—writing task in the NMET, they have to take a large amount of writing practice. Nevertheless, teachers are still crazy about error correction to their students’ writing and regard it as one of essential parts in the writing exercise. Although teachers do correct the students’ errors in their writings sedulously, some students, especially those with low proficiency, still repeat the same kinds of errors in their subsequent compositions after receiving corrective feedback(CF) and even lose their interest in practicing writing. It is really awful to find that they even abort their effort to write something and hand in blank papers.According to the current situation of the English writing instructions to students in Chinese high schools, the present empirical study aims to shed light on the basic view of teachers’ error correction and on what kinds of corrective strategies can be effective on students writing by a quantitative study part and a qualitative study part. Through this study, the teacher can find some guidance to their practical operation of corrective feedback in the field of EFL writing.This paper has totally selected 60 students from two classes in a high school of western China as the sample of this study, who were the Senior One students in the second semester. They’re divided into high-proficiency groups and low-proficiency groups in light of their linguistic proficiency and their attitudes towards teachers’ corrective feedback were recorded by a survey designed before the study. Students of the high-proficiency groups and low-proficiency groups were further divided into control groups and experimental groups and then received a pre-test to collect their fundamental errors of the target linguist form and figure out their error ratios. The study was conducted within the three variables, including the language-level of learners, feedback forms and the target linguistic form(Nonfinite-verb used as adverbial). During the following four- week writing practice after the questionnaire, all the students took the practice of sentence transformation and translation. Half of the subjects in high-proficiency experimental groups received direct corrective feedback(with meta-linguistic explanation) on the target structure in their writing practice while the others obtained indirect corrective feedback(underlining), and so did the low-proficiency subjects in the experimental groups. The control groups received no CF on the errors of the target linguistic form. After receiving CF, the subjects in the experimental groups were given enough time for teacher-student conference on the target linguistic form on a voluntary basis. Meanwhile, individual time for teacher-student conference was collected. Four weeks later, all of the subjects took the post-test immediately. Comparing the results of the two tests, we found all the experimental groups showed different improvement in the accurate use of the target structure, while the two control groups, showed no significant improvement. Five weeks later, all the groups took another test—delayed post-test, whose results were different from those of the post-test. With regard to the four experimental groups, they all had regression to a certain extent. The more proficient students receiving direct CF and those who received indirect CF regressed slightly, and they still had obvious advantage in the accurate use of the target form in their writing over those in the control group. On the other hand, in the low-proficiency experimental groups, students who received indirect CF regressed more than those who received direct CF. What’s worse, it is noticeable that there was no significant difference between the less advanced students who received indirect CF and those in the control group. In the end, student-participants from the experimental groups completed their post-study introspective questionnaire to know their feelings and suggestions for teachers’ corrective feedback. According to the results, this paper tests and proves the different effectiveness of two feedback forms on the learning of target linguistic structure, for different students with different language-level in the writing practice. In addition, it has provided some useful and practical strategies of corrective feedback implementation in the EFL writing. Meanwhile, it demonstrates that some proper forms of corrective feedback are indeed facilitative to students’ learning of the target form in the present research.