A Comparative Study Of The Effects Of Face-to-face Feedback And Written Feedback On Senior High School Students’ English Writing

As a senior high school English teacher, the author has known a lot about English writing teaching through many years’ teaching experience. In fact, both the teacher and the students are well aware of the importance of English writing. First of all, according to National English Curriculum for Common Senior High Schools(Trial), to cultivate students’ comprehensive ability is the overall goal of English teaching in senior high school. Writing is an important skill which can reflect the students’ ability to use what they have learned. Secondly, writing test in the college entrance examination also occupies a rather important position. In the total score of 150 points for the Sichuan College Entrance English Exam, test questions on writing ability make up 45 points,which includes task-based reading of 10 points and written expression of 35 points,about 30% of the total score. However, writing teaching is not optimistic, which is a headache for both students and English teachers. One of the things that puzzles many teachers is why students go on making the same mistakes even when such mistakes have been repeatedly pointed out to them( Harmer, 2001: 99). Faced with such a dilemma, the author believes that the only thing to do for English teachers is to change the concept of teaching, and change teaching methods. Famous educator Ye Shengtao once said: “It is correction that makes the composition better.” He also said:“To the student’s writing, the most effective way is to give it face-to-face feedback.”Mr. Ye Shengtao’s remarks illuminate the direction of English writing teaching for the author.Therefore, this paper aims to explore the effects of the traditional written feedback and face-to-face feedback on the writing of senior high school students, and to explore thedifferences in the improvement of English writing, in the hope of providing some reference and suggestions for English writing teaching in the future.In this study, the Interaction Hypothesis and the Process-oriented Approach are combined with Noticing as its theoretical framework. The author studied the effects of written feedback and face-to-face feedback on the English writing. The aim of this study was to investigate the following three research questions:1) Can the 2 types of feedback--- written feedback(WF) and face-to-face feedback(FF)--- improve senior high school students’ writing?2) Are there significant differences in the effect of 2 kinds of feedback--- written feedback(WF) and face-to-face feedback(FF)--- in improving senior high school students’ writing? If so, what are these different areas?3) What is the attitude of high school students to the 2 types of feedback---written feedback(WF) and face-to-face feedback(FF)?In order to solve the three problems above, the study is conducted with 96 subjects who are from two parallel classes of the same grade(the first grade) and have been instructed by the author of the thesis in Jiang’an Middle School, Yibin, Sichuan Province. The main research methods are questionnaire and testing. The experimental group was 48 students, and the control group was 48 students. The students in the experimental group were carried out with face-to-face feedback, while the control group were carried out with the traditional written feedback. The purpose of using the questionnaire was to understand the true views of the two groups of students on the received feedback. After the experiment, the author analyzed the relevant data, and carried on statistics analysis through the SPSS software.The experimental results show that written feedback and face-to-face feedback on the students’ writing skills are effective, while face-to-face feedback is more prominent in the content and the form of writing than written feedback. In addition, the results of the questionnaire also showed that the students agreed that both written feedback and face-to-face feedback were effective but they preferred the latter one.The experimental results agree with the importance of teacher feedback in English writing teaching, and provide some enlightenment for the future teaching of English writing, which has reference value for the future research of English writing in senior high school. Due to the small number of experimental samples and the short experimental time, this study has some limitations, and many problems need to beimproved.