A Study On The Effects Of Different Types Of Teacher Written Feedback On Senior High School Students' English Writing

For writing instruction, teacher written feedback has become an important research topic. Recently, as the writing ability is viewed as a more important part in high school English instruction in China, the study of high school teachers' actual written feedback and its effectiveness deserves adequate attention.Through experimental teaching conducted in a high school, this study attempts to find out the types of teacher written feedback which a teacher actually gives to her students' writing and to examine the effectiveness of two most frequently-used types of teacher written feedback during three months. Meanwhile, the students' attitudes and perspectives on it are investigated with a questionnaire. The subjects of the study involve one female English teacher in high school and 60 students who are randomly chosen from two parallel classes which she teaches. Based on the main types of teacher written feedback actually given on students' first compositions, the students are separated into three groups: respectively direct written feedback group(Group A),indirect written feedback(Group B) and the control group(Group C). The control group is not given written feedback only apart from their writings' scores. During the whole empirical study, every student is requested to finish four outline compositions,the types of which are common in English writing of NMET. Besides, they are asked to revise their compositions at least once on the basis of the written feedback given by their teacher. The statistic of the main types of teacher written feedback, the number of errors per 100 of the first and fourth compositions, and the data collected from the questionnaires are evaluated carefully and analyzed by way of SPSS 20.0.The study includes following major findings: 1) Among all types of the teacher's written feedback, direct written feedback occurs most frequently. It is followed by indirect written feedback. As for the comments on students' writings, the teacher puts more emphasis on the structure or organization of their compositions; 2) Students make progress in the accuracy of English writing after receiving two types of written feedback most frequently provided by the high school teacher. There is no significant difference between direct written feedback group and indirect written feedback group,but direct written feedback group make relatively fewer errors on average than indirect written feedback group; 3) Most of the students consider it important for teachers to give feedback to their compositions and hold the view that teacher writtenfeedback indeed helps them improve writing abilities. Besides, between the two types of written feedback, they prefer direct feedback.This study contributes to a better understanding of the focus of teacher written feedback, including the error feedback and written commentary which are used in the high school writing instruction. Furthermore, it can help Chinese high school English teachers to give more helpful and effective written feedback to students' writing.