An Investigation Of Students' Perceptions Of Teacher Written Feedback In EFL Writing In Senior Middle School

Writing is one of the most important skills for language learners. To help students improve their writing skills, teacher written feedback is considered important by most of the researchers. While much research has been done on the effect of teacher feedback, not much has been known about students' perceptions of teacher feedback, particularly secondary school students. The purpose of this study is to investigate senior high school students' perceptions of the teacher written feedback,led by the research questions of how students perceive the usefulness of teacher feedback in EFL writing, to what extend students pay attention to teacher feedback in EFL writing, and whether there is any difference of students' perceptions toward teacher feedback in gender and language level.The present study administered questionnaire to 132 students and interviewed 12 students from a senior middle school in Nanchang in order to investigate their perceptions. Based on the data analysis, some main findings can be summarized as follows:As the results show, high school students take teacher feedback very seriously.This can be reflected in the following aspects: most of the students read repeatedly and think carefully about the returned composition with teacher feedback; most of them would revise the marked errors. When they encountered unknown teacher feedback, most of them would ask classmates for help instead of their teacher. Most senior high school students think that teacher feedback can help them improve their writing skills and improve their interest in learning English.There are some differences in students' perception of teacher feedback in gender and language proficiency level. First of all, high proficiency students pay more attention to the teacher written feedback than low proficiency students. Girls pay more attention to teacher feedback than boys. Secondly, high proficiency students prefer the teacher mark all the errors and give specific comments on their writings to the briefly teacher feedback. Girls prefer the teacher mark all the errors and give specific comments on their writings to briefly teacher feedback. Finally, males do not like long and complicated corrective feedback. Because of different gender or other factors, female seems to be more patient and pay more attention to teacher feedback than males. The results of this study suggest that teachers' feedback should be specificand detailed. In addition, teachers should give the corresponding teacher feedback for different students and develop different strategies on giving teacher written feedback.