Impact Of Teacher Written Feedback:Chinese EFI Learners' Corresponding Revisions And Perceptions

The present thesis reports a study which examined the effectiveness of a Chinese EFL writing teacher' written feedback for students' subsequent revision,including what feedback the Chinese EFL writing teacher provided to the students,what revisions the students made, and how the students perceived the teachers' written feedback.Both the teacher and the students came from a foreign language university in South China. The study followed one writing task of the teacher and collected three main data sources to answer the three research questions respectively: the teacher's written feedback on the student participants' first draft of an essay, the student participants' revisions in their second draft with reference to the teacher's written feedback, and the interviews with six purposefully selected student participants. The teacher's written feedback and students' revisions were both ecological data because they came from the teacher's natural teaching. Differently, the interviews were intentionally designed and conducted to collect data for the current research.The results of data analysis revealed that the teacher delivered comprehensive written feedback, provided more in-text / local negative feedback than positive feedback, and gave more feedback on language form than on content. The teacher preferred using various symbols to indicate the improper places as main feedback strategy. Simple end commentaries were occasionally used to emphasize the main problem of the writing. Scores were provided in terms of four aspects of writing:length, content, language, and structure, in order to transmit clear messages to students.The teacher's feedback helped improve students' writing significantly in this study. Students used most of the teacher's feedback in their revision, no matterwhether they were content-focused or form-focused. Specifically, students used 68%of negative feedback and 85% of symbol-indicated negative feedback to make revisions in the subsequent revision.Interview data revealed that students valued and understood most of the feedback points though they sometimes had confusions about some of the symbols the teacher used. They valued feedback on content more than feedback on language,but language was still their first concern when they made revisions using the teacher's written feedback. Students reported that they appreciated and benefited from both the positive feedback and the negative feedback in this study, though some students seemed bothered by the large amount of negative feedback. Four students reported that they considered the scores fair on the whole.Overall, this study verified the positive effectiveness of teacher written feedback for students' corresponding revision. By looking deeper into how students responded to each feedback point, this study suggests that it is important for teachers to provide clear written feedback on their students' writing, and students should be required to respond to teachers' feedback, and even revise their own writing in light of teachers' feedback. Only in this way will teachers' efforts not go in vain and can students gain real benefits from teachers' feedback.