The Effects Of Indirect Written Corrective Feedback On The English Writings Of High Scorers And Low Scorers In Junior Three

How to improve the effectiveness of writing teaching and students' writing ability has overwhelmed the teacher and students for a long time.Indirect written corrective feedback was one of the ways for teachers to point out errors in students' writing and its effectiveness in language acquisition was discussed in abundant empirical researches at home and abroad from various perspectives.However,most of the researches were conducted under the ESL background,empirical researches on this topic for junior school English teachers was relatively few at home.Based on previous studies,the current research was to explore the effects of junior school English teachers' indirect written corrective feedback on students,writing with the EFL background in order to arouse students' awareness of errors and to self-repair these errors,thus to improve students' writing scores.The current research aimed to answer the following three questions:1.What is the distribution of error types in the compositions of high scorers and low scorers?2.To what extent are the indirect written corrective feedback accurately perceived by high scorers and low scorers?3.To what extent are the indirect written corrective feedback accurately self-corrected by high scorers and low scorers?To answer these questions,the author conducted an experiment in a middle school in Anyang,Henan province,which lasted for two months.40 Junior three students were chosen from two classes according to their mid-term examination and grouped into high scorers and low scorers.All of them finished a 100-word composition in 30 minutes for 6 times,and all of their compositions were given indirect written corrective feedbacks by their teachers.Then,according to Park's(2016)categorization of students'error types,an independent samples T-test was employed to analyze and compare the data of students' writing experiment.The major findings were shown as followings:Firstly,tense and conjugational errors were the most common errors for both high scorers and low scorers,followed by lexical misuse,orthographic errors and particle errors.High scorers mainly focused on tense and conjugational errors.Low scorers made orthographic errors and lexical misuse.There was significant difference in the distribution of errors between high scores'and low scores' writing.Secondly,more than half of the total errors could be perceived by both high scorers and low scorers.And,high scorers outperformed low scorers in perceiving tense and conjugational errors.Whereas,there were still one third of the total errors couldn't be perceived by them.Low scorers were less able to notice tense errors and particle errors,and there was no significant difference in students' ability to perceive the lexical errors no matter high scorers or low scorers.Thirdly,most of the total errors could be self-corrected by both high scorers and low scorers.And,high scorers outperformed low scorers in self-correcting orthographic errors,particle errors and lexical misuse errors.Whereas,there were some of the total errors couldn't be self-corrected.Low scorers couldn't self-correct orthographic errors very well,and there was no significant difference in students' self-correcting of tense and conjugational errors.Some implications were obtained based on the findings:(1)Teachers should pay special attention to different error types according to the distribution of those errors in students' writing to intensify students' understanding of grammar.(2)Teachers should specify their indirect corrective feedback to improve students' ability in perceiving their errors.(3)According to the difference between high scorers and low scorers' ability in self-correcting their errors,teachers should lay emphasis on students' practical use of grammatical rules.