A Comparative Study Between High School English Teacher's Feedback Tendency And Students' Preferences For Feedback

As a comprehensive language skill in English learning,writing has always been the focus of study for the teachers and researchers in the field of English language teaching and research.And feedback is an indispensable guiding element in teaching and learning writing.The learner's attitudes towards feedback partly determine whether the teacher's feedback will play a positive role.Therefore,the current research,which is based on Process-oriented Writing,Noticing Hypothesis and Interaction Hypothesis,has applied both qualitative and quantitative research methods,including conducting two surveys and two interviews among some teachers and students in Xu Yi High School,Jiang Su Province.Besides,students' marked written works are gathered and analyzed to conduct a comparative study between high school English Teachers' feedback tendency and students' preference for feedback.By these research methods,the following results and conclusions are obtained:The vast majority of the high school English teachers and students realize the importance of feedback in writing teaching.Most teachers focus more on vocabulary and grammar in students' compositions and comment more on these aspects,which is in line with the preference of students.Teachers favor written feedback while the students expect teachers to integrate it with peer feedback and individual feedback.Most teachers fail to read and mark all the written compositions each time they are handed in,while almost no students want to see their compositions returned unmarked.Most teachers spend more time marking some particular group(s)of students' compositions while students hope teachers can treat them equally.In addition to vocabulary and grammar,students request more feedback on discourse structure rather than on the content and ideas.Students hope for specific comments while more than half of the teachers only occasionally give specific comments.Teachers usually give advice as comments while students prefer praises.The current research also finds that there is a discrepancy between teachers' belief about feedback and their actual feedback practice.For example,the vast majority of teachers believe that it is important to check students' correction of errors pointed out by their teachers in their compositions,but few of them can keep doing it.They also recognize that rewriting and multi-draft writing is beneficial in developing students' writing ability,but they just fail to carry out strict supervision.Teachers also believe that comments on students' compositions should be mostly praises while,in actual teaching practice,praises only slightly outnumber criticism.This study provides the following implications: high school English teachers should communicate with students more frequently to understand their attitudes towards the feedback mode in use and to know their needs,on which to base their adjustments.Finally,the author puts forward some suggestions that can serve as a reference for writing teaching on how to improve teachers' ability to give feedbacks and thereby narrowing the gap between their feedback tendency and students' preference.