A Case Study Of Influence Of Writing Conference On Cohesion In Senior High School Students' Writing

Chinese students can find English writing a difficult language skill to master, and in writing, particular difficulties can be in cohesion and the correct employment of cohesive devices in writing. With the wide acceptance of process writing, much more emphasis is laid by teachers on using feedback to improve students' writing skill. Feedback through writing conference is such a way that the teachers communicate face to face with the student on their writing. There has been plenty of research on writing conference overseas, whereas in China, few studies have been done on this form of feedback in spite of its frequent use by teachers, especially in senior high schools.To explore the influence of writing conference on the improvement of cohesion in writing of senior high school students, a case study approach was adopted in the study. The subjects of the study were six students chosen from a class of science in Grade Two in a senior high school. First, the students took the first writing task within thirty minutes in class. After giving the written feedback, the teacher had individual writing conferences with the six students in the teachers' office one by one. The conferences were audio-recorded for later analysis. About one month later, the students were required to write on the second task of similar type. Students were also asked to hand in a self-report about the effect of this feedback. The study did quantitative and qualitative analysis respectively of 18 drafts of writing, 6 recordings of conferences and students' reports.The results of data analysis showed that writing conference could promote the correct use of cohesive devices to a degree. That is, this form of feedback does have positive influence on cohesion in students' writing. However, the degree of influence varied among different students. Furthermore, students responded differently during writing conference. Generally speaking, students tended to just follow and accept the teacher's suggestions. But as the conference proceeded, certain students took the initiative to raise questions when discussing with the teacher and became more active, as reflected also in their self-reports.In summary, the study sheds light upon some pedagogical implications of writing conference on the teaching of writing, hoping to provide some reference for future writing teaching and the research of feedback. At the same time, as a case study, it also contains limitations, and it suggests that for future study a larger-scale study should be carried out to see if such influence could be consistent among the students.