A Study On The Features Of Teacher Written Feedback To English Compositions Of Senior High School Students

Teacher Written Feedback, as a kind of evaluation method, plays an important role in Senior High School students’ English writing. For the last two decades, numerous scholars have dedicated themselves to studying Teacher Written Feedback in the process of teaching. However, few have paid attention to differences among Senior High School English teachers of different ages in adoption of Teacher Written Feedback.Therefore, this paper is undertaken to investigate the types of Teacher Written Feedback employed by Senior High School teachers, including the general features of Teacher Written Feedback, the differences in the use of Teacher Written Feedback between young teachers (below 30) and middle-aged teachers (above 45) as well as students’ perceptions of their teachers’ written feedback through samples, questionnaires, and interviews. The research questions addressed in this thesis are:1) What are the general features of Teacher Written Feedback to English Compositions of Senior High School Students? 2) What are the differences of Teacher Written Feedback between young teachers (below 30) and middle-aged teachers (above 45)? 3) What is the students’ perception of their teachers’ written feedback?Both quantitative and qualitative methods are adopted in the study. The quantitative research mainly involves 600 scored compositions and a self-designed questionnaire with the whole internal reliability reaching.814. The questionnaires are handed out to 188 Senior One students from Danyang Senior High School and Danyang Lv Shuxiang High School on January 6th,2016 and finally 161 are found valid. Then, the data is processed by SPSS 16.0. The qualitative research is an unstructured interview with 6 students and 6 teachers. The interview is carried out in Chinese and the whole process is tape-recorded. Afterwards, the results are transcribed into English and the transcriptions of the interview are carefully analyzed.Detailed analysis of both quantitative and qualitative research yields findings which are presented as follows;Firstly, Senior High School teachers present two kinds of Teacher Written Feedback:Error Feedback and Non-error Feedback. They report a relatively high frequency of using of Error Feedback, while they rarely adopt Non-error Feedback in marking students’ writings. Among Error Feedback, the teachers prefer to choose Direct Corrective Feedback, of which frequency is slightly higher than Indirect Corrective Feedback. As for Non-error Feedback, Suggestions on Future Work for Improvement is the the least frequently used feedback.Secondly, there do exist age differences between young teachers (below 30) and middle-aged ones (above 45) in the adoption of Teacher Written Feedback. Generally speaking, young teachers (below 30) get higher mean scores than middle-aged ones (above 45) in Error Feedback as well as in Non-error Feedback. What’s more, the two age groups show highly significant differences in Error Feedback (p=.000<.05). Additionally, when the micro-level categories of Error Feedback are examined, young teachers (below 30) differ greatly from middle-aged ones (above 45) in Direct Corrective Feedback (p=.000<.05), among which two age groups show much difference in Modification on Vocabulary (p=.000<.05), Modification on Grammar (p=.000<.05), and Modification on Spelling (p=.006<.05) as well.Thirdly, Senior High School students hold different opinions about their teachers’written feedback. A majority of students prefer teachers to use Error Feedback when marking their writings. And in terms of Error Feedback, Modification on Grammar is perceived to be the most favored Direct Corrective Feedback. Indicating+Locating the Error is the most preferred Indirect Corrective Feedback, whereas Indication Only is the least received one. When it comes to Non-error Feedback, most students prefer Suggestions on Future Work for Improvement to Indication of Good Sentences or Expressions by Underlining with Wavy Line.In light of the findings, this paper makes some pedagogical implications for English teachers. They should lay more emphasis on Teacher Written Feedback, and choose appropriate feedback types according to students’error categories, which may lead to diversity of feedback types in student’s writings. Besides, It is worth noting that, English teachers are supposed to pay more attention to the different language proficiency exhibited by higher-level students and lower-level ones in writing. Then personalized teaching methods should be adopted, according to their unique characteristics.