The Effects Of Different Teacher Written Feedback On Grammar Accuracy In Students' Writing Of Junior High School

In recent decades, many researches had been conducted to study whether teacher written feedback can improve students' grammar accuracy in foreign language writing. Since grammar accuracy is an important standard in judging students' writing performance, it's necessary to give an investigation into it. Although Truscott(1996) proved that no improvement was reached on grammar accuracy through teacher written feedback. However,a large number of other experimental researches had came to opposite conclusion. For example, Ferris(2003) found that teacher written feedback did help students to improve grammar accuracy(the application of articles) in their writings. Since English writing was still the most anxious part for both teachers and students. Teachers in middle school never stop to seek better ways to improve students' English writing level. Some researchers found that teacher written feedback had the function to improve students' English writing level(Ferris and Roberts, 2001) while in Kepner(1991)'s study no improvement on writing proficiency was found. Thus, no conclusive results about teacher written feedback on students' English writing level were got. Based on the previous studies, mainly on the Bithcherner & Cameron's(2005) study, this article gave a further investigation into the effectiveness of teacher written feedback on students' grammar accuracy in their writings.Three theories laid the foundation for the present research. The three theoretical foundations are: Krashen's Input Hypothesis, Process Writing Theory and Noticing Hypothesis. The experiment in this article was deigned to solve three questions:(1) Does teacher written feedback help to improve students' accuracy of the third person singular form?(2) Which type of teacher written feedback improves students' accuracy of the third person singular form more efficiently, the direct one or indirect one?(3) Do the two teacher written feedback types have sustainable effects on improving students' third person singular form?60 students(36 were males and 24 were females)are selected as the participants. They all came from Junan No.7 Middle School. 60 participants were divided equally into three groups,which meant each group had 20 participants. One group was chosen randomly as the controlled group while the other two groups were used as experimental groups. The two experimental groups were treated with different types of teacher written feedback: directteacher written feedback and indirect teacher written feedback. It took 8 weeks to conduct the experiment. The writing materials used in the experiment were from high entrance examination test paper and mid-term test paper. All participants were required to finish one composition within 30 minutes every week during the whole experiment. For example, the participants completed compositions within 30 minutes and handed them to the researcher immediately. The researcher took one day to deal with participants' compositions with two different kinds of written feedback(direct feedback and indirect feedback). The controlled group received no feedback. Afterwards, the researcher returned these compositions to participants and asked them to read the feedback carefully and correct them on Thursday. The next week another writing task would be continued with the same steps. The feedback treatment stage last four weeks. This article used one research method: quantitative analysis.Besides, pretest, posttest and delayed posttest were employed in this experiment. The statistics collected in the experiment were analyzed with the help of SPSS17.0.The results of the experiment were:(1) teacher feedback did have the function to improve students' accuracy of the third person singular;(2) comparing the results of posttest in two experimental groups, the present study found that participants treated with the direct teacher feedback performed better than participants with indirect teacher feedback;(3) the delayed-posttest showed that two teacher written feedback types had sustainable effect on participants' writings, but the indirect teacher feedback type had longer influence.