A Study Of The Effects Of Different Error Correction On College English Writing

With the development of process writing,the form and function of teacher's error correction have been changing,which has attracted a large number of language researchers and teachers.They have carried out a series of in-depth researches on error correction methods used in language learners' writing assessment.The topics of those studies mainly involve the effectiveness of error correction,error correction contents,error correction methods,the behavioral agent of error correction and so on.However,the research purpose,research subjects,research methods,research process and the analysis of research results are not the same in most of the existing researches,and there is no definite conclusion of the necessity of error correction in English learners' writing and of effective error correction methods.Due to that,it's very difficult to apply present research conclusions directly to College English writing teaching in China.In addition,given the real situation of Chinese College English writing instruction,while students hope for teacher's effective error correction,yet many errors appear repetitively in their English writing and the effectiveness of teacher's error correction are not so satisfactory.On account of the two reasons mentioned above,this study chooses 68 students majoring in painting as research subjects.They're from two classes of one comprehensive university in Wuhan and one is called the Directly-Corrected(DC)writing class with the other the Underlined-and-Coded(UC)writing class.The whole experiment lasted 10 weeks of one semester.The study is designed on the basis of pretest,experimental treatment,and posttest.In the pretest and posttest,students were required to write two compositions on different CET4 writing topics.In the experiment,students were arranged to write another two compositions(called experimental composition 1 and experimental composition 2)in the procedure of “first draft(Draft 1)-teacher's error correction-self revision-final draft(Draft2)”.For Draft 1 of the Directly-Corrected class,the researcher underlined all the errors and wrote beside the correct forms or corrective suggestions.For Underlined-and-Coded writing class,the errors were only underlined and coded without correct forms beside.All the compositions were graded by two teachers(i.e.the researcher and another College English teacher)according to the evaluation standards of CET4 writing.Then the average grades were taken as students' writing grades.At the end of the experiment,all the research subjects joined in a questionnaire survey and some of them received the face-to-face individual semi-structured interview with the researcher.This research aims to find out the effectiveness of two different methods of error correction on students' College English writing as well as students' responses and attitudes toward teacher's error correction.Based on the data collected in the pretest and posttest and dealt with by SPSS,it's found that after 10-week experiment,students' English writing performance in general in the the Underlined-and-Coded writing class has seen significant improvement in the posttest,while that in the Directly-Corrected writing class has no significant progress.Seen from different language proficiency levels,the writing performance of lowly proficient students in both classes has obviously improved in the posttest,while the writing performance of highly proficient students hasn't improved significantly and that of the highly proficient students in Directly-Corrected writing class has been negatively affected.In line with the results of the questionnaire and the interview,almost all the students acknowledged the necessity of teacher error correction and many of them think it's helpful.For these two error correction methods,it seems that more students show preferences for the Underlined-and-Coded error correction method.As for these findings,the researcher provides some possible explanations based on the existing studies.With the research results,the research hopes that this study can provide some empirical support for the existing related conclusions and some pedagogical implications have been offered in the conclusion.