An Empirical Study On The Effect Of Feedback Types On Students' English Writing Proficiency

Writing,as an essential skill of communication and comprehensive evaluation of students' language proficiency,its importance is increasingly outstanding in foreign language learning.However,it is a common phenomenon that there are more and more students in an English class caused by the enrollment expansion of colleges,which,obviously,makes it difficult for teachers to assess students' writing and give feedback.As a result,the effects of writing instruction are not to satisfaction.In Recent years,dramatic changes have taken place in educational patterns and methods owing to the rapid development of science and technology.The application of computer technology in English writing instruction is a typical example.Online automated essay scoring(AES)systems,lessening the heavy tasks for teachers to grade students' writings and provide feedback by automatically providing assessment and feedback to students' compositions,are brought to use in some colleges and universities.But teachers' assessment is still dominant in most colleges and universities.Feedback has become an important research subject in second language acquisition or foreign language writing instruction.The research on feedback at home and abroad mainly investigated the effects of teacher feedback orAES feedback on students' writing proficiency.However,few empirical studies are found to explore the different effects of two types of teacher feedback and AES feedback on students' writing proficiency.Therefore,it is necessary to conduct a comparative study among three different types of feedback to figure out their influence on students' English writing proficiency for the purpose of providing enlightenment and reference for feedback giving in College English writing teaching.Based on Output Hypothesis and Noticing Hypothesis,an empirical experiment is conducted in three experimental groups from two non-English major classes in Guangxi University.By collecting data from pre-test,post-test,questionnaires,interviews and case analyses,combining qualitative and quantitative analyses,the author intends to propose an ideal way of feedback for college English writing.It aims at answering the following four questions:1)Is there any improvement in students' writing proficiency after receiving teacher feedback(grading marks,grading marks plus correct answers given)and juku grading feedback?If yes,in what ways?2)Is there any difference in students' writing proficiency after receiving teacher feedback(grading marks,grading marks plus correct answers given)and juku grading feedback?If yes,in what ways?3)What is students' attitude towards different feedback?4)What is the ideal feedback on students' writing?After sixteen weeks' experiment,the author has the following findings:1)Teacher feedback(grading marks,grading marks plus correct answers)and AES feedback are helpful for students' writing since students' writing proficiency in the three groups is improved to different extent after the experiment.Specifically,students receiving teacher feedback with grading marks showed the improvement in word choice and conventions;students receiving teacher feedback with grading marks plus correct answers made progress in terms of word choice,sentence fluency,conventions and presentation of writing paper;students receiving AES feedback were excellent in word choice and sentence fluency while poor in content.2)Among three types of feedback,students who received teacher feedback with grading marks plus correct answers made the biggest progress and they outweighed the other two groups in terms of convention;in the aspect of organization,students who received AES feedback of Juku grading system obviously lagged behind students from the other two experimental groups who received teacher feedback;3)The majority of students are supportive of three types of feedback,and more students have a preference for teacher feedback with grading marks plus correct answers.4)Based on the research results and analysis as well as the students'perceptions,the combination of teacher feedback and AES feedback would be the ideal way in English writing.This thesis is focusing on the effect of feedback types on students'English writing proficiency in the hope of providing reference to teachers.The limitations of research time,numbers of participants and research design need to be improved.As to the conclusion that the combination of teacher feedback and AES feedback would be the ideal way in English writing,further empirical research and analysis need to be conducted to validate it.